


One Summer's Day

by lutzaussi



Series: One Summer's Day/Always With Me [1]
Category: Naruto
Genre: Alternate Universe, Canon-Typical Violence, F/F, F/M, Foxes, Fuck Canon, M/M, Multi
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-06-06
Updated: 2016-06-06
Packaged: 2018-07-12 11:30:10
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 28,075
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7101409
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lutzaussi/pseuds/lutzaussi
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Iruka never expected to be more than an Academy teacher, but in the span of two years he became the head of a nearly-extinct clan, inherited a house and a lot of money, and adopted two orphans. But he has a family now, and it's sort of nice to not feel alone.</p>
            </blockquote>





	One Summer's Day

He appears inside of the classroom, right in front of where Iruka is sitting at his desk. He drops his (well-deserved) cup of tea, curses. An apologetic look flits across the other’s face, but he ignores the cracked cup and spilled tea, pulls out a scroll from his belt pouch.

“I’m sorry to ask you to do this,” he says, placing the scroll atop the desk, “but I have to leave—can you take this to the Hokage?”

Iruka’s nose wrinkles. He touches the scroll, and his face wrinkles further. It is sealed, dripping with chakra. Discomfort and something like sadness fill the young teacher. “A will?” he falters.

“I wish—” the other young man breaks off, looking with irritation and embarrassment over his shoulder. “I-I don’t expect to come back. Please—please tell Anko.” Without even waiting to hear an answer, he leaves.

Iruka was previously going to to straight home after finishing his planning for the next day. Those plans and himself go out the window. He would finish his lesson plan after eating, and get to school early the next morning to clean up. But first, to the Hokage.

His stomach churns as he enters the Tower, waiting patiently for the Third’s assistant. Yasu had not been back from missions for months—being an ANBU captain, it was his life. But for him to say he wasn’t planning on coming back—Iruka cuts that thought off, with effort thinking about what to eat for dinner.

Shinobu reappears within a short time, looking confused as to why Iruka is waiting at her desk, but takes him back to Hiruzen without complaint.

The Hokage is tipped forward in his chair, making a valiant effort to look like he is working but failing rather miserably, judging by the scattered missives  on the floor and the logic puzzles currently being shoved under his robes. Shinobu merely makes a “tsk!” noise, and sweeps back out.

“Ah, Iruka,” he says, foregoing any effort to continue hiding the papers. “What brings you here?”

Iruka tugs the scroll out of his vest pocket, hating how his hands shake slightly as he hands it over. “This was given to me by Wakahisa Yasu,” he says, “to file with you.”

The look in the Hokage’s eyes as he looks over the scroll is sad, sad, sad. “I am sorry you had to learn of it in this way,” his voice is grave when he speaks again, scroll in his hands. “Wakahisa-san and his team are on their way to Kirigakure in order to save the last remnants of the Yuki Clan who petitioned us for help and refuge. It is likely that few of them will return.”

And Iruka feels numb. “How long?”

“Two weeks. If anything changes, I will find you immediately.”

Still numb and sad and uncertain, Iruka leaves, making his way slowly to his apartment. The hardest part will be telling Anko—and he isn’t even sure he can. Anko’s relationship with Yasu was lukewarm normally, particularly following her almost intimate association with their former teacher. But they had been a team and teams were family even through their dysfunctions.

He doesn’t realize that he has made it home until he is standing in his kitchen, sandals off and a pan in his hand. He’ll tell Anko tomorrow, definitely.

But he does not tell Anko the next day, because she crawls her way through his window and his chakra traps in the middle of the night with an unreadable expression on her face.

“‘ruka,” she says, rolling onto his bed, “‘ruka, what did Yasu do?”

And he is 17 and she is 18 but she was always his little sister, so he tells her and hopes she won’t punch him. “He has a mission. To Kiri. I don’t know if he’ll come back.”

Her face crumples and it takes everything that Iruka has not to leave the village to hunt down the one man who ruined all of her chances for good relationships before leaving to drag Yasu back. So he holds her as best he can and they wake up in the morning before the sun with knotted hair and drool on their faces. Anko giggles slightly when he blinks awake, which he considers a triumph.

She leaves him after a quick breakfast, going about her own day but with a long promise to see him nebulously later. He nearly forgets about needing to clean the classroom—or at least his desk—but he gets to the school building early enough that he has plenty of time. Suzume stops by to go over his lesson plans with him, and Iruka has only been at his post for one year so he is grateful for whatever help the other teachers offer.

He has the trouble class. Or, more aptly, he _inherited_ the trouble class from Yoshida Makoto when she retired. Naruto he could handle, but combined with the Nara and Inuzuka boys, they’re more than a handful. Uchiha Sasuke is also a problem, if only from his insane popularity and the fact that he saw most of his family slaughtered only a year before. All of Makoto’s petitions for him to be placed in a foster home or to delay his training until he was more emotionally stable were shut down by the Council or the Hokage himself, and Iruka has seen few children sadder than Uchiha Sasuke. And they are going to be his class for until they graduate, which means several more years of stress and misery for Iruka.

The day is a blur, and before he knows it not only the day but a week and a half of Anko sliding into his bed in the middle of the night and him not yelling at his class as much as usual have passed. Suzume almost looks concerned, but he suspects the Hokage makes her drop it.

On that day, the one and a half week mark, Anko finds him after he lets his class out early. He wouldn’t normally, but they have homework that will take them some time. She arrives chewing a half-eaten stick of dango, another stick in her hand.

“The Hokage said they would be back soon?” she asks around the sticky sweet. Her voice is hesitant and uncharacteristically subdued.

Iruka nods, shuffles his paper into a pile and files it in the desk drawer. “Four days. He said he would tell me if anything changes,” he reminds her, sweeping off his desk and turning to clear the chalkboard.

Anko hunkers down on one of the desks and ignores the stinkeye he sends her way. She says nothing, but lazily watches as he straightens up the classroom. If she didn’t know that he secretly loves teaching, she would think he hates it as he mutters and putters around the room.

Their peaceful reverie is interrupted, as all are in Konohagakure, by the arrival of a bird. Specifically, one tapping its small beak against one of the large windows at the rear of the room.

Anko drops her last skewer of dango. Iruka drops the wastebasket. They both curse, look at each other, and follow the bird at breakneck speed to the Hokage Tower.

Any hope Iruka had of good news dies when they are ushered into the office, where Hiruzen waits with a blank face and an unsealed scroll close to his hand. Likewise, the eager expression on Anko’s face is quickly replaced by one akin to despair.

“Mitarashi Anko, Umino Iruka,” the Hokage speaks, “I regret to inform you that Wakahisa Yasu has been killed in the line of duty.”

And—that was the thing. With wills . The jutsu that keeps them sealed is dependent on the performer being alive—even if they run out of chakra. It is a self-sustained jutsu that will only break if the performer is killed. There is no reason to doubt, no reason to hope.

Anko grips Iruka’s arm with both of her hands, breath coming in pants. Her face is screwed up, but she stays quiet as Hiruzen speaks again.

“I expect the remainder of the team to return in the coming days. Two others were killed as well,” and Iruka is reminded that this old man has seen many die, even children, but his voice is ever sad, “At such time when they arrive, we will have the funerals. I have planned everything according to Wakahisa-san’s wishes, and as such will read his will two days following his funeral.”

Knowing that this is the end of the one-sided conversation, Iruka respectfully bows, and with his arm around Anko, he leaves.

As much as he wishes it would, the death of his best friend does not stop the rest of the world. Iruka still must get up and teach his class, though Suzume and Ebisu push him to take a couple of days off after the funeral, and he is the only thing making sure that Anko eats. The only relief he has is that the Hokage will oversee the funerals. ANBU funerals are the worst; they are not open operatives, and report solely to the Hokage, so it makes explanations difficult.

The arrival of the remnants of the ANBU team herald a change in the temperament of many villagers. With the four remaining nin, there comes a stream of ill-equipped and ill-fed refugees. Less than two dozen, but that is still a lot. The citizens of Konoha know what it is like to lose their homes, though, and so are waiting with arms open to welcome the last of Kiri’s Yuki Clan. Iruka and Anko revolve around the placement and integration plans, but are never sucked in. The children that survived the hard march from Kiri are all too young or too old to be in Iruka’s class, and, anyway, the Hokage wants them to settle into the village before they start in the Academy. An exceedingly political move, to take in the hunted refugees, but when Hiruzen talks about it Iruka can easily tell that the old man wants to help them.

Not to say that the Hokage always made such selfless decisions.

The reappearance of the ANBU squad means funerals, means a lot of drinking for Iruka and Anko, means a lot of trying to forget.

It rains, the day of Yasu’s funeral, which is dramatic if not appropriate. There are few present—five or six ANBU who stay only until it is appropriate for them to leave, the old man who owns the barbecue place and treated Yasu like his own child, the Hokage briefly appears with Shinobu and Shikaku, and Iruka and Anko. Anko cries, the entire time. She has never known loss as acutely as her teammates, but in the face of it she is inconsolable. Iruka feels empty, more than anything else. Most of his formative years before and after his parents’ deaths were spent with Yasu and Anko and their sensei. It had changed when sensei left, but it is changing again, and in a way that Iruka hates.

Anko slips her hand into his, leans her head on his shoulder as they are left alone at the short grave marker. After a while, once they are thoroughly soaked and chilled to the bone, Iruka tugs Anko gently out of the graveyard, to his apartment where she sits in the bath for an hour before they fall asleep together on the couch. The next morning, early, a bird taps the window and leaves a scroll telling them that the Hokage will see them in two days to read Wakahisa Yasu’s will.

So it is two days and they stand again, side by side, in the Hokage’s office, Shinobu waiting quietly beside and behind the village’s leader. In her arms are assorted bundles wrapped in rough burlap. The will had already been processed by the time of the funerals, which meant that he is free to read it.

“Well, you are all that is named in the will,” the Hokage has his half-moon spectacles on as he looks up from the scroll to the two nin standing, still in their mourning blacks. “And I am sure that this week has been long enough as it is. I shall get on with it.” Clearing his throat, he begins reading, “I, Wakahisa Yasu, citizen of the Land of Fire and shinobi of Konohagaure, being of sound mind and understanding, do forthwith write and publish this Last Will.

“At the time of this Will I am the last remaining scion of the House of Wakahisa, the guardians and protectors of the Old Way. I leave behind no heirs, and no relations.

“To my teammate Mitarashi Anko, I leave the swords Ame-no-nuboko  and Ame-no-Habakiri , formerly in the care of the Uchiha Clan. May you use them wisely, and remember your roots,” Hiruzen motions with a hand to Shinobu. The woman sets down the bundles, withdrawing two of them and presenting them to Anko, who is shaking. “Being the last of her own house, I offer Mitarashi Anko a place in the annals of the Wakahisa Clan, should she choose to accept it. In addition, half-income of the Wakahisa estates and lands will go to Mitarashi Anko, and be hers to do with as she sees fit.”

Anko gasps a little at that, covers her mouth with her hand. That is no small sum of money; the Wakahisa lands are rented by farmers, built upon by shops and apartments, and regularly put to use by the Hokage and Council for training exercises and festivals.

The Hokage breaks from the scroll, looking with kind, sad eyes at the purple-haired jounin, “If you do wish to join the Wakahisa Clan, Shinobu will help you with the paperwork,” before he returned to reading. “To my teammate Umino Iruka, I leave the main house and properties of the Wakahisa Clan, including half-income of the Wakahisa estates and ownership of the swords Juuchi Yosamu  and Yawarakai-te , formerly in the care of the Hyuuga Clan. Being the last of his own house, I offer him headship of the Wakahisa Clan, should he choose to accept it.”

It is Iruka’s turn to gasp, to clutch at Anko. Shinobu moves to give him the two blades, which he clutches to his chest. Neither he nor Anko really hear what the Hokage reads after that, too stunned at Yasu’s generosity and care for them.

It is as if he is in a haze when they leave the Hokage’s office. Shinobu leads them into a back office, where they must fill out some routine paperwork as well as the papers that will name them as part of the Wakahisa Clan. When Iruka fills out the ownership and inheritance forms, his hands shake.

It takes a few hours, and when he looks up from his drying signatures, and Anko is similarly done. A stack of thick, official papers are in her hands, pressed to her chest, and her eyes are still wide with disbelief. She looks a mix of sick and excited, the same two emotions pooling in Iruka’s own stomach.

Shinobu officiates their papers, and has the Hokage sign them. She sends them on their way, to relax the weekend away before they return to work, and to get used to their new names and their new lives.

It takes a week for Iruka to work up the courage to visit the Wakahisa compound. Anko offers to come with him, but this is something he knows he must do alone.

The compound is inconvenient to get to from his apartment, but is near the Academy and the Hokage Tower. It is to the west of the monument, allowing him a lovely view up the First’s carved nostrils, and hidden behind a dark-stained wooden fence. There is one large, traditional-style building dominating the tree-bordered, stone-paved courtyard. The stones are worn from decades upon decades of use, and they sink slightly around the well. He walks the perimeter first, where a grove of old smooth maples blend out into the edges of the forest where more, smaller buildings hide in the trees. There is no fencing on this side of the compound, and Iruka smiles to remember Yasu saying that connection to nature was important to his family.

There are two small, slightly overgrown vegetable gardens fenced in the two southern corners, and he sees at least three foxes and one wild pig close in the woods. Connection to nature, indeed.

After the walk, he steels himself and heads to the house, pausing to admire the tamed camellias  growing near the door. Iruka peels off the seal on the front door, feeling satisfied when a smooth touch of his chakra disarms the traps and opens the locks, allowing him inside the amado, and then inside the shoji. Ignoring tradition, he keeps his shoes on as he enters the house, moving softly.

It is labyrinthine, dark, and dusty. Dry rustling tells him that mice or other small animals have managed to work their way inside, but there are no bats that he can see in the dim light, and the house is steadfast enough that there is no weather damage. Iruka wanders through the kitchen, a large room bisected by panels painted with nature spirits and calm scenes, and a tea room that is filled with boxes. On the far side of the tea room, he hits an inner courtyard, where, though small, a well-kept garden and koi pond wait. He pauses, lets the late spring sun warm his face, before continuing.

The house is like a box, of which the center is the koi pond and garden. It is massive and sprawling, and has an upper level that was added more recently. The upper level has leadlight windows cut into small diamonds, which he opens, and they look down on the inner garden, which falls into an interesting three-pronged spiral shape.

There is more clutter on the top floor, more things. There is a room largely taken up by an overflowing kamidana, full of shining ihai emblazoned with the names of Wakahisa ancestors, another room full of more unmarked boxes, and yet another room full of stored kimono and futons and other furniture. And, to his utter confusion, there is a dojo.

Anko will need to come with him, he thinks as he considers a pile of threadbare blankets. The next time he comes—or that afternoon. They’ll need to clean—dust everything, air out the futons, clean the tatami. The tatami are new enough that they don’t need replacing, but a couple of the shoji need patching, and two of the top-floor windows are cracked. If he is going to be living in this house, he reasons, he sure as hell wants it to be worthy of the Wakahisa name that he now bears.

Swinging the windows shut and sliding the doors closed, he unscrews the two cracked windows and wraps them in blankets, pinning other blankets over the holes left behind. It is still early in the day—he heads to the glass maker’s on the south of town and drops off the windows. They’ll take a week to replace the diamond-shaped panes, which gives him plenty of time to deal with everything else.

Iruka stops by his apartment, considers the boxes he has packed, and decides to wait on those, but he takes a large bento he prepared that morning and heads to pick Anko up.

She is at their old training field, Practice Area 2, and has hardly broken a sweat even though Iruka suspects she has run through her katas at least three times at top speed. A training dummy pinned to one of the practice logs is full of kunai and senbon, particularly centered around the heart and the crotch. He pauses to watch her collect herself and slip into the stretches that give the both of them their almost inhuman flexibility and coordination. With the ease that Anko had in obtaining the rank of tokubetsu jounin, Iruka has no doubt that he would easily make the rank as well. But that would mean the possibility of reassignment—and though he knows that Hiruzen is beginning to groom him to be the next Hokage’s advisor like Shikaku is his, it enables him to continue teaching, which is his true passion.

Anko tackles him out of his thoughts, managing to somehow not jostle the bento despite her energy. “‘ruka!” she yells, not unlike his students yell each other's names when they’re planning on getting into trouble. “Can I go with you to the house, can I, can I?”

Though glad she is once again in possession of her former energy, Iruka wishes she would calm down if only for the sake of his back. “Yes, I was wondering if you’d come,” he grabs her arm like a vice and smiles charmingly, “you can help me clean!”

She wails, but makes no move to break free from his hold as they march through the village. Most of her excitement about the house is because her visits to it were few and far between—when Yasu was out of the village for long periods, he would ask the barbecue shop owner’s daughter to look after it, and before when they trained together they never went. Anko bounces with excitement as they get to the fence, but calms as they enter it.

Iruka gives her a short and sweet tour (during which she pauses over the boxes in the tea room, muttering to herself with a pinched look on her face) before they go into the inner courtyard and break into the bento that Iruka brought from his apartment.

Their lunch break is short, and before long they get to work, dragging the futons and blankets out into the main courtyard, leaving them draped over the fence and any free spot to air out. The boxes come next, and they place them along the opened engawa which is actually quite wide, wide enough and long enough for the multitude of boxes to fit easily. Anko begins going through the boxes while Iruka finds the ripped shoji and patches them.

She is still working, unpacking dishes and vases and utensils and all manner of other items, so he leaves her to it and heads to the outbuildings. The one east of the house is a large bath connected to a small hot springs, the sulfur smell of the springs coloring the air. It at least _looks_ clean, but Iruka isn’t holding his breath that it is use-ready. There are three sealed boxes of almost-new towels, which he drags out toward the house. The other building holds miscellaneous storage, but is thankfully mostly empty, with only one box needing to be dragged out and three brooms falling apart in one corner.

Reappropriating the bristles and one handle, he makes a new broom using some chakra wire and sets about sweeping out the building. At one time, it must’ve been home to the kamidana that was in the top floor, but it is closed up and dark.

Anko is done with almost half of the boxes by the time he is done cleaning the two outbuildings, stacked into two categories: keep, and give away. She stretches and pokes him when he comes to stand next to her, “Did you clean the cupboards out?”

He laughs, slightly, “No. We can do that right now.”

“You’re a slave driver,” she whines, leading him back to the aired-out, thankfully updated kitchen, “Gods, I know what your students feel like now.”

He chuckles a little at that, and begins opening the cupboards. They move through the room, Iruka opening and Anko wiping out the dust, until they make it to the last ones, and a discovery. Iruka has to force the door open, and a neatly wrapped package falls out, followed by an ancient pack of candies. The package has a note tied to it, reading in near-illegible handwriting, “give to dog.”

“Dog?” Iruka asks.

“What? Yasu never had a dog,” Anko replies, grabbing the package but handling it carefully, “maybe he means to somebody else’s dog. What could it be?”

He shrugs, “knowing Yasu, anything.” The package goes atop the pile to keep, and they return to their task. They bring the kitchenware in, shelve it, and end for the day. Anko has training with Ibiki the next day, but Iruka plans on coming back to the house and cleaning up some more. They seal the amado, ensuring everything is safe inside, and head their separate ways.

It takes him a few weeks of working after classes and over the weekends to make the house fully habitable. Between those two, and seeing Anko basically every other day, he is suitably exhausted that most nights he doesn’t even dream.

Three weeks after his first visit to the house, he and Anko stand in the courtyard. The building is freshly cleaned and practically shining from the care they took in restoring it. The windows are whole, the tiles on the roof unbroken, and the electricity working. Iruka had a hell of a time of it, but he also got the futons tucked away in oshiire, the kitchen stocked, and his possessions dragged over and tucked away.

Anko secreted a bottle of good-vintage sake out of the Wakahisa wine cellar days before, so they sit on the inside engawa close to the koi pond and drink and talk for hours—about Yasu, their genin training, and the future. When she rises to leave, Iruka catches her coat and asks, a little less than sober, “Do you want to live here? Because—technically we’re family now, and Genma and Raidou will probably leave us alone—”

She cuts him off when she tackles him into a tight hug, eyes bright, “I thought you would never ask, ‘ruka.”

And in that way spring marches to summer, and Iruka is free from his children from July until August. A month of bliss.

In the second day of their summer break he realizes that he never really lost his rebellious streak when he breaks the Hokage’s edict to never mention the Kyubi. It had always been a stupid idea, in Iruka’s mind. Even if the citizens and nin of Konoha never mentioned the demonic fox, that didn’t mean they didn’t treat Naruto like shit, and, in the boy’s opinion, for seemingly no reason.

When he is walking home with ramen from Ichiraku that evening and sees the boy being advanced on by a drunkard with a bottle raised in one hand, he intervenes without thinking. Sending the man on his way with a broken nose and a few choice words about what he had tried to do, Iruka picks the boy up from where he has twisted himself into a protective pretzel and takes him home. Anko, to Iruka’s never-ending thankfulness doesn’t question it, just gives the boy her ramen and shares Iruka’s.

“Eh, Iruka-sensei,” Naruto finally says after Anko has left for an evening run and he has been roped into drying the dishes, “why did you chase that man away? No one’s ever done that before.”

Iruka has to take a moment—he sets down the dishes so he won’t break them and he breathes deeply. He _knows_ that the Hokage has ANBU following Naruto when he isn’t in school, at least most of the time. For them to not care about the boy being _beaten—_ well, what was formerly a plate is now in pieces on the floor, and Naruto is looking at him with that shadow of fear in his eyes.

“I did it because no one deserves to be in that situation,” he says, finally. “And because a man beating up a boy is wrong.”

Naruto sniffles, looks from the broken plate up to his teacher, suddenly seeming much smaller that his normal rambunctious self, “Why is everyone mean to me? I didn’t do a-anything, but they d-don’t stop being m-mean.”

So Iruka tells him. It isn’t planned out in any way, and he has questions that Iruka literally cannot answer without the Hokage executing him, but after it’s explained Naruto seems to understand, even though it makes him angry. Iruka can relate; after getting over his aversion to the boy, many of the Hokage’s decisions had pissed him off.

Anko returns, a bag from the dango shop in one hand, and they have a somewhat late dessert with tea. When Naruto tries to go, though, Iruka catches him before he makes it to genkan and chucks him gently onto a made-up futon in the front room.

“You live all the way across the village—you’re staying here tonight,” Iruka intones in teacher-voice, and the boy dazedly nods and borrows a toothbrush before going to bed.

Anko slips her arms around him as he closes the shoji so the boy can sleep, says, “You’re a bad influence. He’s never gonna leave, now.”

Iruka can’t help but chuckle, but then he sobers up, “Maybe it’ll stop civilians from trying to kill him.”

She hisses, eyes dark, “Hiruzen can be a bastard.”

And—well, he can’t help but agree.

Anko turns out to be right; once invited, Naruto never leaves. But when he is there, he is not as abrasive as with the rest of the world. The boy is quiet, and more than a little sad. After two weeks of him staying day and night at the Wakahisa compound, Iruka decides that filling out the paperwork might be a good idea. He asked Naruto, and the boy was definitely excited about the prospect of having a real family.

The three of them troop to the Hokage’s office a day later, scrubbed clean and, in Iruka’s case, with a single-minded determination. If the old man isn’t going to let Naruto move in with them, or take the Wakahisa name, then he has another thing coming.

Shinobu looks pleased if not a little confused to see them and hear Iruka’s request for adoption and change of residence papers. She hurries into the Hokage’s office while the three of them fill out the papers, yells a little, and retreats to where they are waiting, smiling. “Hiruzen-sama will see you whenever you are done,” she says, smiling sweetly and giving Naruto a ball of mochi from what appears to be her own bento.

Iruka signs the paperwork for Naruto to join the Wakahisa Clan as Anko helps the small blond finish the change of residence paperwork. They only take a couple minutes, and they file into the Hokage’s office with the papers in Iruka’s hands. The old man takes one look at the papers and says, “Iruka, if I could talk to you alone?”

Restraining himself from rolling his eyes, Iruka turns to the other two and ushers them out, sure that they will both try to listen in. When they’re gone, he asks, “Is there a problem with the information we have provided, Hokage-sama?”

Hiruzen steeples his hands in front of his face, considering the teacher. “I do not understand why you are taking the boy in, Iruka. You already have many duties—”

If Iruka is going to hell for cutting off the most revered man in the village, so be it. “He needs a family, Hokage-sama. And this way you don’t have to worry about losing your ANBU to follow him,” he says, not completely able to bite back his frustration. “Naruto needs someone to look after him.”

That earns him a sigh and a pensive look, but the old man signs the papers and hands them back to him. The Hokage says no more, but nods to him in dismissal, already looking deep in thought. Iruka opens the door to find Naruto curled up against Anko, sniffling.

The boy launches himself at Iruka, catches him around the middle and holds tight, voice muffled when he says, “Thank you, Iruka-sensei.”

Shinobu looks just a little weepy when he hands her the signed and stamped paperwork, and if she bursts into tears on her way to the filing room, well, that’s none of Iruka’s business.

They head to Ichiraku to celebrate, and Teuchi as, if not more, excited than they are, giving them their orders on the house. Ayame comes to congratulate them as well, and Iruka wishes that more people cared for Naruto as these two do.

The next week, they take what can only be called a family picture. Iruka has a wall of photographs, in the room where the kamidana had been before they dragged it downstairs. There’s pictures of his parents and family from when they lived in Kirigakure, when he was too young to remember, pictures of Yasu and Anko and him from their years training together, a picture of them standing in front of their sensei but cut in such a way that his face is not visible. But there are no pictures of Naruto, no pictures to commemorate their new-found status as a family.

So a new picture goes up; he and Anko are bent forward so they are almost level with Naruto. The boy has an armful of sunflowers, the last from the garden, and is smiling his usual infectious smile. A portent, maybe, of how good life is going to become.

When the academy resumes, at the end of August, there is a slight shift in his class. Naruto all but stops acting out, though still sometimes cutting class with Kiba and Shikamaru, and the other kids start being more gracious to the blond. While not fully accepting him, and still holding onto their parent’s prejudices, he at least has someone to play with in the afternoons, meaning he’s not always annoying Iruka. Anko is gone a lot, working with Ibiki to train his recruits in poisons and tracking, but they nearly always have dinner together, which is pleasant. They fall into a neat routine that, in the middle of October, is shaken up.

Naruto has a habit of bringing in strays. Dogs, cats, occasionally a rabbit or a fox, and once a wild boar. Normally it doesn’t trouble Anko, as she is the one who deals with them, and Iruka for the most part is okay with it. She helps Naruto heal them if they need it, feed them, and send them on their ways. Only one stays around—a little shiba with caramel coloring and a taste for dango and Naruto’s style of play, which involves a lot of rolling around on the ground.

But Iruka and Anko were never expecting the boy to drag in a human, particularly a _bleeding_ human named Uchiha Sasuke.

“He tripped on a rock and got a bloody nose,” Naruto announces as he drags the uncomfortable looking boy to where the adults are considering the freshly-fertilized and mulched vegetable garden in the south-east corner.

Anko rolls her eyes in tandem with Iruka, and they go to get the boys cleaned up.

Sasuke is quiet as Anko instructs him to hold his head forward and pinch his nose while she finds an ice pack and a washcloth, and Iruka wrangles Naruto into clean clothes, bandaging his elbows. Though chilled from the outside air, Sasuke doesn’t protest when Anko gently lays the ice pack across his nose, and turns a peculiar shade of red when she holds his forehead to make sure he doesn’t have a fever.

After a half hour of the nosebleed slowly stopping, it is night and Sasuke moves to go, but like Naruto only months before Iruka slings him into a prepared futon with a short lecture about not crossing the village at night.

Anko slips her arms around him again when the boys are asleep and nuzzles her head into his chest like a big cat, says, “You are literally the worst. We’re not even both twenty and we basically have two children.”

“More like I’m not even twenty and I have _three_ children,” Iruka mutters, biting back a shriek when she narrows her eyes and bites his fingers with her freakily sharp teeth.

Again, Anko is right; Sasuke stays. It’s not as frequent as Naruto, at first, but three nights of the week he sleeps over. There’s something gentle about the way the two boys treat each other. Great loss knows great loss, Iruka reasons. They are each sad on their own, but together it is lessened.

Naruto does better in class, with Sasuke there to explain concepts and readings in his blunt, no-nonsense way. And Sasuke relaxes, a little, is more open and talkative at least while at the Wakahisa house. Anko sort of freaks him out, with her complete lack of care about personal space and her somewhat vulgar manner, but Anko knows more katon ninjutsu than Iruka does so he grows used to her presence. But with Iruka, he talks theory and practice and all sorts of advanced ninjutsu and genjutsu, and Iruka enjoys finding books that the dark-haired boy will read and enjoy reading.

So by the time their month-long winter break comes, Sasuke is spending most of his time at the Wakahisa house. Hiruzen mentions it in an off-handed way when Iruka has an early shift in the mission room and they’re alone, saying, “I have heard that the young Uchiha boy has been spending a lot of time in the Wakahisa compound,” as though it is a dig for information, but Iruka has his own opinions about the boy staying under his roof.

“Maybe he’s just sick of staying in the same place where his family was massacred,” Iruka mildly replies, checking over the last nin’s report to ensure it is complete. He signs it and passes it over to the Hokage, who signs it in silence.

Iruka knows that Hiruzen knows he is right. The way he handled both boys was short-sighted but adequate at the time, and in many ways the easiest out for him.

The Hokage finally sighs, and speaks, “The Council does not think that the interactions between Naruto and Sasuke is appropriate, considering their circumstances.”

The tic under his right eye that typically starts whenever his students were acting up is itching to begin. Iruka stays quiet, looks over the next two forms that nin had dropped off. “What, ah, _about_ their situations?” he finally asks when he knows he won’t yell, laying down the paperwork to focus his attention on the old man.

Hiruzen looks very uncomfortable, as if everything he is saying is not his idea. “Considering that an Uchiha must have had a role in destruction of Konoha, and that Sasuke is the last remaining one,” he sighs again, shakes his head. “Danzo has beliefs that few share, but many are persuaded by.”

“I am not going to make them stop being friends,” Iruka asserts, putting together the papers in preparation to leave. Raidou _should_ be there in a couple of minutes. “They’ve both already had to deal with enough from the rest of the village.”

The Hokage nods, says, “It will be good for them. Be careful, though, Iruka. You are a good person, and I would hate to see your life ruined by anything the Council comes up with.”

He nods in return, stands as Raidou enters, looking like he would rather be back in bed. “Thank you, Hokage-sama,” Iruka says, and for the first time in a long while, he actually means it.

And when class resumes in the new year there is another nearly imperceptible shift. Through osmosis, maybe, Sasuke begins to speak more and reveals himself to be the highly knowledgeable nerd he is to the rest of the class, losing some of his quiet mystery. That doesn’t stop most of the other kids from idolizing him; if anything it makes it sort of worse. But he and Naruto are friends now, and anyone who is friends with Naruto is guaranteed to become more personable.

Before long, the photograph they had taken—Iruka, Anko, and Naruto—is replaced by a new one, right after more paperwork is filed. Sasuke and Naruto are both tall enough that the adults don’t need to lean forward to fit in the frame. It’s almost like a traditional family portrait, and Sasuke is even smiling with his teeth showing. They take the photograph in the fall, the day the smooth maples begin shedding their crimson leaves.

And Iruka marvels at how his life has changed.

The Hokage lets Anko take more missions, infiltration and information gathering that hones her skills for Ibiki. Time blurs a little bit; in two years Naruto finally has enough control over his chakra and a good enough relationship with the Kyubi to manage a normal bunshin no jutsu and Sasuke is basically ready to graduate, though the Council never agrees with Iruka’s petitions for him to sit the final exam.

That summer, two years later, they stumble upon a hidden cellar full of artefacts and scrolls. There are weapons galore, some with attached cards stating their owners, some wrapped in silk and all but forgotten about. The scrolls key to Iruka’s chakra, and contain histories and techniques and forbidden knowledge. Sasuke and Naruto are therefore banished from the newly-found cellar, and Anko’s ingenious use of chakra wire and banana peels prevents them from making their way in.

Iruka reseals many of the scrolls, reshelves them in an organized fashion, and drags the weapons up to the dojo. The two boys enjoy going through them, and Naruto finds one with a peculiar note attached to it that reminds Iruka of another package that he and Anko found, three years previous.

“Iru-tosan!” Naruto screeches from the top floor. Iruka was attempting to make dinner, but the continuous interruptions from the two boys and Anko in the dojo makes it difficult. “Anko-basan found something!”

“Ne, Iruka?” comes Anko’s voice, “Where did I put that package that was labelled for a dog?”

He extracts it from one of the lesser-used kitchen cupboards, shakes off the dust, and climbs the stairs, hoping that the water won’t boil while he’s gone. “I have it—what did you—” he stops and gapes.

The dojo is in _chaos_. There’s a massive stack of half-broken bo and naginata stacked in a messy pile on one wall, rows of swords in every imaginable style laid out, and a motley assortment of knives and daggers with and without sheathes that make walking to where the three are sitting difficult. Sasuke helpfully tries to clear away a path, but he’s more interested in what Iruka’s holding than making the room less deadly to traverse. “What is it?” he asks eagerly, shoving Naruto aside so that Iruka can sit down, with the package.

“It isn’t labeled to me, so I didn’t open it,” Iruka gently chides the two overeager boys. “Why did you need it, Anko?”

“This tanto,” she has a black-sheathed blade in one hand, and is frowning down at it, “had this attached to it.”

She hands him a folded card. In Yasu’s cramped chicken scratch, the message reads, “repaired blade, new mounts, save for dog.”

“Why would a dog need a tanto?” Naruto asks, head cocked to the side, a gesture mirrored unconsciously by Sasuke, who then pulls a face at the blond.

“Dogs can’t use swords,” he says, sounding slightly self-righteous.

Anko crows with laughter, says, “You’ve never seen the Inuzuka ninken? Those dogs are trained with blades, though Tsume isn’t too big on it, and they can handle something as simple as a small tanto.”

Sasuke looks dumbfounded and Naruto looks confused. Which is understandable, because their only point of comparison is Kiba and Akamaru, who just started training a couple months before. Maybe he’ll take them over to the Inuzuka compound and see if Tsume will give them a demonstration. Hell, maybe he’ll ask Tsume to come talk about ninken to his whole class.

“Leave them together up here, then,” Iruka instructs Anko. “Whoever this ‘dog’ is, they’ll get their things back eventually. Please start cleaning up; I would like for us to eat dinner before it’s morning.”

Somewhat disappointingly, it takes them another year to finally learn who the ‘dog’ is, but the time does not pass slowly. Naruto begins picking up sealing techniques—whether by natural skill or family association—and Sasuke begins to take up the sword, using a shortened chokuto that Anko blunted for his use. She isn’t the best at swordplay, but there is no end of teachers willing to train the Uchiha heir with the sword. Iruka personally prefers tanto and sai, but he still finds it useful to train with the boy sometimes. Jirayia begins corresponding with Naruto at Hiruzen’s request, though snippily refrains from visiting to see the boy or Konoha.

Iruka sits under the kotatsu, a cooling pot of tea close at hand and a stack of half-graded papers scattered around. Naruto and Sasuke are out—Sasuke said they were going to go to the library, but after more than an hour of sitting in silence Iruka has no doubt that Naruto will drag the other boy out to play or train. It’s nice to have the large house almost to himself—after all, years ago he thought it would just be him and Anko living there.

Anko herself has been running in and out of the house all morning like a headless chicken, arranging flowers, chucking around kunai, muttering to herself. Fall reminds her of sensei, of her anger. She’s out in the woods, running around with the shiba when Iruka feels the prickling of energy at the base of his neck.

It is something that he picked up from Yasu when they were young, appropriately a Wakahisa technique of awareness that has a wide radius. The disturbance is not anyone he knows; Naruto is like a pillar of gold chakra shot with blue, Sasuke like a dancing flame, and Anko a calm, cool familiar flicker of black-blue. This person is white, crackling like electricity along his spine, so he stands and stretches, heads to the door and slips on his sandals.

A nin that he has seen before but never, never talked to waits outside. Hatake Kakashi waits just outside the fence, where the gate arch is, a note of perplexion and something like annoyance on his face as he hovers and looks down at a paper clutched in one of his hands. The Hatake Kakashi that Iruka has heard legends of from his fellow teachers and chuunin is decisive, a good leader, always knowing what needs to be done and never willing to abandon his fellows.

Quite a digression from the man standing at Iruka’s door, looking like he would rather be anywhere but there.

“Hatake-san?” he asks.

The man’s head jerks up and his visible eye widens almost imperceptibly. “Wakahisa-san? I was given this,” he holds out the paper so that Iruka can take it, and even after years of being called ‘Wakahisa-san’ it is still strange to be given that title, “by Wakahisa Yasu four years ago.”

The paper is soft and worn, nearly fallen apart from the years of folding and unfolding. In the familiar cramped hand, he reads, “dog—when released go to compound packages there.” The drop of Yasu’s chakra that is still pushed into the page snaps into Iruka like it is a part of his own chakra. Well, at least he’s not lying.

Iruka knows his eyes are wide—he’s excited. Naruto and Sasuke are going to hate that they weren’t at the house to learn who the ‘dog’ is.

“Yes, Hatake-san,” Iruka gestures for the man to follow him to the building, “they’re inside the house. I’ll be one minute.”

Hatake waits in the genkan as Iruka trots up the stairs to the dojo.

And promptly finds that the tanto has been misplaced. Sighing at Anko’s annoying need to reclean the practice room religiously, he collects the package they had found in the kitchen and heads back down the stairs. The shiba, which the boys have taken to calling Ayame, is looking quite self-satisfied with Konoha’s famous Copy Nin rubbing her head.

Iruka whistles, and the dog yips, regretfully moving into the house where she will undoubtedly lay under the kotatsu. “We found a tanto, too,” Iruka says, “but Anko must’ve misplaced it.”

Hatake looks somewhat embarrassed at being caught with the dog, but graciously accepts the silk-wrapped bundle. “A tanto?” he asks.

“It had—been repaired, if I remember correctly,” Iruka replies. “When I find it I will get it to you.”

The elite nin nodded once, and disappeared in a swirl of smoke.

Iruka is still standing in the genkan when Anko reappears moments later, dragging a sledge of neatly chopped wood to a stop outside the half-open door.

“‘ruka,” she pauses, squints at him, “what th’ hell are you doing?”

“Ah,” he shakes out of his thoughts, says, “Hatake Kakashi picked up a package.”

Her eyes go round, and she asks, “ _Hatake Kakashi_? Is _he_ the dog?”

“Yes, but you must’ve misplaced the tanto; I couldn’t find it,” he moves to help her get the sledge to the formerly empty outbuilding, which they converted into a wood shed the year before. The wood smells sweet and sap clings to their clothing as they stack the split logs, a comfortable silence filling the gaps between their speaking.

Most of the swords and daggers and other packages that Yasu labeled for other people were gone. They had been picked up, dropped off, and sent by courier to their rightful owners. Yasu had been a prodigious weaponsmith before he was recruited to ANBU, so some of the deliveries were quite old. The package that Hatake had picked up was one of the last.

Naruto and Sasuke reappear when they are finishing up, and Anko goes in to have the boys help her with dinner. After changing—pine sap is not conducive to getting work done—Iruka returns to his long-cold pot of tea and his stack of papers. Ayame the shiba lays with her head across his lap and only moves when Anko starts bringing dishes in.

“They kicked me out of the kitchen,” she slips under the kotatsu across from Iruka and pouts, laying her head on the table. “I trust Sasuke with knives, but Nar-chan gets over-eager with the potatoes.”

“Curry?” Iruka asks, shuffling the papers into a pile and standing to stow them somewhere safe.

“With _tomatoes_ in it,” Anko complains, “I don’t care how much Sasuke loves them, putting them in curry is absolute _blasphemy_.”

“Anko, you don’t like tomatoes in anything.”

“I like tomatoes on—” she thinks, hard and long, “no, you’re right, tomatoes are disgusting.”

Iruka can’t keep from snickering. When Sasuke had surreptitiously planted some tomatoes the year before, she had made a point of watering around them and not weeding near them—though the boy had done those tasks himself. Sasuke has a healthy amount of respect for the woman, and Anko enjoys the boy’s presence and dry wit, so it isn’t that big of a point of contention.

They eat a lot of curry. Even Anko, though she complains about the presence of the tomatoes constantly. Life is pretty damned good.

Naruto has to pass the final exam. He has to pass it, or Sasuke and probably also Kiba and Sakura and Ino will kill him. The five of them did a bunch of study sessions, and Sakura practically stayed over at the Wakahisa compound for two solid weeks to help Naruto with his reading. He’s at the point where he understands most, if not all, of the theoretical and practical ninja skills, and he has no problems demonstrating them. He doesn’t always understand the phrasing of the test questions, and his reading comprehension leaves a lot to be desired.

But he needs to pass the final exam, because if he’s stuck in Iruka’s class for another year Iruka is going to be the one to kill him.

Iruka isn’t proctoring his own class’s test, which is almost a relief, but he has work in the mission assignment room which is very high-traffic and stressful in its own right. He gets off an hour before his class is finished, and meets Anko for tea and dango to pass the time.

Anko shares his stress. Not to the same degree, but enough so that she’s sympathetic and listens to his ranting.

They leave with fifteen minutes left and join the congregated crowd of eager parents. Most are glad to see Iruka—he’s a good teacher, and the main reason many of their children will become nin. But some still avoid him because of his adoption of Naruto and Sasuke.

The door opens and Sakura comes running out, her new headband held high and something like a scream coming from her mouth. First she tackles Iruka, hugging him tightly around the waist, before finding her parents. The rest of the kids come out like that, attacking and thanking Iruka first before leaving with their parents. Naruto and Sasuke come out at the same time, the blond with an impossibly wide grin on his face, Sasuke with a smaller, matching smile on his face. Their headbands are already tied around their foreheads.

Though they have graduated, they are not technically genin until they have a jounin sensei that passes them. Which means more work for Iruka—all but one of the kids in his class passed, which makes an even 39 students to be split into groups. Not all of them will pass; at most probably four or five groups of three, but it’s a lot compared to the two teams out of four that passed the year before.

But he’ll help the Hokage with the team assignments tomorrow.

Iruka wishes he _didn’t_ have to help the Hokage with the team assignments. For most of the teams, it’s common sense. The next generation of Ino-Shika-Cho needs to stay together, the future medic-nin need to be dispersed to different teams, and a whole laundry list of other requirements. Hiruzen actually wants to keep Sasuke and Naruto together, which is pretty amazing, but he and Iruka are stumped for who to assign to their team until Iruka hesitantly suggests Sakura.

Somehow the Hokage agrees, and starts assigning them all to jounin teachers. It’s mostly random, except for Naruto and Sakura and Sasuke. Those three get Hatake Kakashi. Iruka is skeptical at first, but gradually admits that, yes, Sasuke is going to need someone to help train him with his Sharingan when it develops, and if anyone can pass his test it’s those three.

He announces the teams the next day, their last day of class. Sakura looks apprehensive at the thought of Hatake being their teacher, but Sasuke and Naruto just trade an amused look. They still want to know who the ‘dog’ is. Technically, they’re supposed to wait for their teachers to pick them up, but half the groups leave before that. Iruka has stuff to do; there’s curriculum materials he needs to pick up and planning for the new year that needs to be done.

Naruto and Sasuke come back that afternoon confused but excited. They don’t say much about Hatake—apparently he didn’t say much to them anyway—but they have their test tomorrow, early. He doesn’t see them in the morning before he heads to the Academy. When he gets home the next evening, food for dinner in a bag in one hand, he finds Sakura, Sasuke, and Naruto all sitting on the engawa at the front of the house, staring off vacantly.

“How did it go?” he asks, slowing nervously.

Sakura considers him vaguely, “Kakashi-sensei is weird.”

“We had to take _bells_ from him,” Naruto adds, sounding vaguely offended.

“He was testing our teamwork, idiot,” Sasuke says. “I think.”

And so they begin training with Hatake Kakashi, who probably wishes he could return to the ranks of ANBU rather than try to control the three kids.

Iruka is tapped for more missions; maybe the council finally realizes how useful his skills are, or maybe they just want him out of the way. They’re almost solely B- or A-ranks, enough of a challenge that he comes home bleeding most times.

He feels better about going on the missions once Naruto and Sasuke have Hatake to train them. Anko is at home when he is away, so there is at least the illusion of stability in their life. And they are often out on missions of their own, D- and C-ranks that don’t go far from the village but still test their  . The first break they have after becoming genin, Iruka’s assigned on a mission north to the Land of Lightning.

It’s late enough in the year that the northern countries are already hit by snow. His goal is a guard hut in the mountains on the border of the Land of Frost, where the drifts are up to ten feet already. It’s a preventative measure, to pull the guard logs to see if there is any threat of war between a rebel faction of nin from Kumogakure and the Land of Fire. Under the table, the Raikage agreed to the mission and pulled his loyal forces out.

Iruka can slightly understand why he is chosen; after all, out of the nin in the village who are available, his skills and variety of ninjutsu are the best choice. But it’s so far away and so cold, he thinks bitterly as he forces his legs to keep moving. He’s only an hour out from the guardpost, and knows that he’ll have to wait for the night to strike.

Night is in four hours.

Iruka stops under the bluff atop which the wooden tower stands. He doesn’t feel completely safe sleeping. He hasn’t felt completely safe sleeping since he left the Land of Fire. It’s a necessity, though, and he’d rather be rested for whatever may come.

His sensitivity is peaked, meaning he wakes up whenever so much as a tiny drop of chakra pings in the mile-wide perimeter. After three and a half hours, three new nin enter the circle, travelling at high speeds directly to the tower and colliding with the five chakra signatures already there. Disappointingly, it’s not a unfriendly collision, and soon enough Iruka can hear their voices, bantering back and forth.

He waits longer, past the half-hour mark, but they don’t begin to quiet or split up. So he sighs and accepts that it’s going to happen the hard way.

Masking his chakra as best he can, he climbs hand over hand up the almost-sheer cliff face. Iruka stops, quietly catching his breath, before letting his chakra expand and moving his hands with quick, practiced ease through one of his most incapacitating ninjutsu.

The falling snow melts, dissipates into steam and boils, changing its properties. Named Quiet Sleep, it had been his mother’s favorite technique. A technique of quick, painless, peaceful death. The first four nin out of the tower fall to it, and the next one catches the tail end of the cloud of toxic gas, which sends her tumbling over the cliff. If she survives that, Iruka’s going to have to deal with her later. A well-timed kunai embeds in the next nin’s throat, and Iruka grabs it, snaps it through the spine.

The last two are trouble; one is already wielding a katana, lightning sparking from the blade, and _damn_ if Iruka didn’t wish he knew some futon to counter that. He just has the tanto strapped to his back, which is ineffective against the length of the sword, but good enough for now.

They circle for mere seconds before the second jumps into the fray, finishing a series of hand-seals.

The sky flickers, grey clouds growing darker and lighting with flashes of lightning. Shit.

He sends out a barrage of senbon and kunai, flickering back into the woods a bit to buy time. The hand seals fly from his cold fingers—suiton is useless against raiton, and he doesn’t know any particularly powerful katon. Futton it is.

He sends boiling acid bullets in a wide spray, hitting the sword-wielder in the leg and melting the end of his sword. The man screams in rage and pain, tosses aside his weapon and grabs at Iruka, lightning crackling along his fingertips. The tanto works like a charm, now that the sword is not a problem, but he cannot avoid all of the lightning dancing in the air, especially since now the second nin is channeling it down from the sky to strike him.

Everything becomes confused in the heat of battle—Iruka ends up taking the man’s head off, but not before something in his leg snaps and pain lances up his spine.

The last nin rushes him, lightning gathered on her hands and lighting up her face. Almost disappointingly, it only takes one kunai to bring her down.

Iruka’s dragging himself up the stairs when he remembers the last nin that fell over the cliff, and he sighs, continues up the stairs. The logs and other documentation are filed neatly above one of the desks, easy enough to seal in a scroll before he hobbles back down the stairs.

The storm clouds that the nin called up are still roiling, grey and heavy with snow. He curses, half-falls down the bluff, and finds the kunoichi who went over, her face upturned and eyes lifeless.

Iruka hesitates as he begins into the trees that mark the border. It took him a week at top speed to get to the border between the Land of Frost and the Land of Lightning. Top speed back, on whatever had happened to his foot, was not possible. After several precious moments of deliberation, he tugs his right glove off, nicks his thumb on a kunai, and summons.

Benihi is as tall as he is, her lustrous red coat a shock against the white of the snow. She yips in alarm at the sudden touch of cold on her paws, and stumbles against him. “Kit,” she scolds, shaking herself, “why do you only summon me when it’s wet?”

“B’cause you’re a poop-head,” screeches a small voice from her back.

Iruka grabs Benihi’s ruff before she can strike the smaller fox on her back. “Beni, we don’t have time,” he grits out. “How far will you carry me?”

“As far as I can,” she yips in reply, lowering herself so that he can climb on.

The smaller fox licks his nose, bumps him in the face with her nose, and climbs under his poncho and his vest once he is settled.

“Shinshu,” Benihi says as she rises to her feet, “if you fall, I’m not coming back for you.”

She explodes south and west, at such a high speed that Iruka is not sure if her paws are even touching the ground. Shinshu chatters against his chest, keeping him awake enough to not lose his grip as they fly through the woods.

Benihi slows and finally stops after several hours. Iruka doesn’t know how long it’s been, but it seems to be around midday. She stakes out a small cave and once Iruka is off her back she collapses, panting.

“Give me three hours,” she yips, exhausted, “I’ll be fine then.”

Iruka waits until she’s asleep before casting a genjutsu over the mouth of the cave and rigging some simple traps. Shinshu follows him in silence, settling herself right behind the line of his genjutsu as a sentry.

He tries to do something for his leg, but he doesn’t want to risk fucking up his bone’s alignment more since it’s already broken. So he wraps it and puts his boot back on and sits against Benihi, keeping an eye on Shinshu and his traps.

Benihi wakens after only two hours, looking strained but ready to go. Iruka destroys his traps and genjutsu, scoops Shinshu under his vest, and climbs back aboard the large fox.

“I can do this for you twice more,” Benihi yips as she starts back into the woods. “But Shinshu can see you home.”

The smaller replies in a litany of barks that are too quiet for Iruka to understand, and that Benihi ignores in favor of running.

Iruka, this time tied to the large fox, allows himself to sleep. He has strange, disjointed dreams about storms and snow laced with lightning, and when he wakes up his face is numb from the wind. Shortly after he wakes, Benihi slows and stops, finds them shelter under the large, gnarled roots of a tree where the snow doesn’t reach.

This time they leave after only an hour of rest, and her paws take them out of the Land of Hot Water and into the Land of Fire. She collapses a ways inside the border, wheezing with exhaustion. “This is where I go home, kit,” she manages to say as Iruka slides off her back, Shinshu clutched to his chest. “Keep her safe. Keep him safe.” And with that she disappears, smoke wisping around his face.

Shinshu slips out of his hands, lands on her paws in the thick layer of snow. “I know the way from here,” she yips proudly, tail stuck out like a red bottlebrush, “Come on, kit, I’ll get you home.” He rolls his eyes, but follows her.

After hours of walking, Iruka can no longer feel his right leg below the knee. Which, as far as he is concerned, is a plus, because they are still three days away from the village. It is the Land of Fire, though, so he feels safe catching sleep whenever he becomes too exhausted.

Benihi had run in thirteen hour bursts, he finally figures out, which meant that it had already been two days when he started walking. The last night (or so Shinshu says it is) he grabs the small fox and rolls under the roots of an overgrown tree for some sleep. Letting his mind wander from the importance of the mission, he tucks Shinshu against his chest. She struggles in an obligatory sort of way, but his arms are much stronger than her slender limbs. Iruka cannot place exactly how long they sleep, but it is long enough that he feels relatively normal upon awakening, despite the lingering darkness in the sky denoting the night. Shishu had wormed out of his arms at some point, and sits less than a meter away, alert to the outside world and waiting for him to get back up.

After Iruka eats the last of his rations, they leave. The fox sets an easy pace west-south-west that doesn’t strain his leg, which is still numb. They walk for hours, until Shinshu’s paws hurt too much from the cold for her to comfortably continue walking. Iruka tucks her back into his flak jacket, and she directs him.

Sometime after midday, the massive walls and open gates rise from the trees, and Iruka is almost home. The two kunoichi at the front guard station wave him in, and one says, “The Hokage is in his office.”

Iruka nods, continues walking. Konoha has seen snow, but only a light dusting that is already mostly swept from the streets. That doesn’t stop it from being fucking _cold_ , enough so that hardly anyone is outside.

By contrast, the inside of the Hokage’s outer office is sweltering. Shinobu is half-asleep at her desk, and a towering pile of ready-to-file paperwork is swaying precariously on her desk. She starts when Iruka stomps in, leg begging to prickle with feeling.

“Ah, Iruka-san,” she brightens, sits up straight, “You can go right in; he should be alone.”

Iruka grimaces, but says, “Thank you.” He slips the scroll out of his pocket, a difficult task with his fingers as cold as they are, and lets Shinshu out of his vest and onto the floor. He could _make_ her leave, but she really has a mind of her own. And she is surprisingly good moral support.

Shinshu leads him to the door, to Shinobu’s amusement, and when he opens it he realizes that the Hokage’s assistant is _wrong_ , he is not alone. Hatake Kakashi is standing in front of the desk, and receiving what could only be described as a dressing-down.

Hiruzen stops, abruptly, as Iruka hobbles in.

Giving the old man a perfunctory bow, he unseals the scroll and divests the papers onto the Hokage’s desk, handing one directly to the man. “That one is time-sensitive,” Iruka explains, rifling through the papers just in case. “The others are less so.”

“Thank you, Iruka-san,” Hiruzen says, skimming over the paper with sharp eyes. “Go get your leg looked at—I want to see you back here in the morning for your report.”

Iruka nods, bends to scoop up Shinshu, and body flickers to the hospital.

The medics at the front desk have to catch him when he appears, and within half an hour he is pushed onto a sterilized table covered with a sheet and his right pant leg is rolled up. Shinshu is standing on his chest, alternately cussing him and the medic-nin out. The kunoichi, Akane, is vaguely amused, but when she starts going over his broken bones, she looks like she wants to join the fox in screaming obscenities.

“Wakahisa-san,” her voice is dangerously low, “how long did you use your leg with it like this?”

He considers lying. For the briefest of moments. And then remembers that this woman could kill him with one well-placed chakra scalpel. “Four—almost five days,” he says, clamping a hand over Shinshu’s muzzle to quiet her. “Only walking.”

The medic-nin sighs. “I’m going to have to reposition the bones before I can kick-start the healing—your tibia has a compound fracture, but your fibula only has a stress fracture,” she says, pulling the cart she brought nearer to her chair. “You’ll only have a cast for a few weeks, if they heal straight.”

Iruka nods, releases Shinshu who, surprisingly, stays quiet. Before Akane can start on his bones, there is a short rapping on the door. She huffs, strides over to the door, and opens it, looking immensely annoyed. Hatake Kakashi is standing there, looking disgruntled but not as irritated as the medic-nin.

“Hatake-san,” her voice is curt, “do you need something?”

“The Hokage sent me,” his voice is a low rumble. “He requests Wakahisa-san come back to his office when done here.”

Skeptically looking him over, she nods, and points to the other seat on the left of the bed. “Sit. He’s going to need crutches, and with the ice outside I don’t want to send him there on his own,” Akane instructs, settling back down next to his broken leg.

Hatake sits, looking immensely uncomfortable, and Shinshu launches herself onto him, yipping. Iruka would grab her, but Akane is in the process of pushing his tibia back inside his body and reconnecting it to the other end. Her hands are lit green with chakra to sterilize the area and heal the exit wound. It takes moments for his skin to heal back over. It sort of hurts.

He can hear Shinshu yipping about dogs, and when he looks at her, her front legs are splayed on Hatake’s shoulders, her back legs on his knees. “She’s like a hyperactive toddler,” Akane comments absentmindedly, moving her hands up and down Iruka’s leg to speed up the healing process.

Iruka agrees. Shinshu has a way of steamrolling everyone, but if Hatake’s more relaxed countenance means anything, it’s not always bad. She has that effect on most people. As the youngest of her family—only 150 years—she is used to being the center of attention. The foxes were his father’s summons, as well, and despite how much they reminded him of how he lost his parents, he loved them all. They were really the only family he had left, at least until he became a genin and met Anko and Yasu.

Iruka loses all track of that thought when Shinshu launches herself back onto him, chattering, “Kit, he smells like dog—why is he here? When are we leaving? Can I see Anko-chan?”

Iruka flicks her on the nose, “Or, you could go back to your home. Stop being nosy.”

Gekkering at him, she flings herself back onto Hatake. “Who are youuuu?” she yowls at him, and at this point Akane looks up from the cotton she has wound around Iruka’s leg.

“One more _noise_ out of you, my furry friend, and I’ll have a nice new fox-fur shawl for the new year,” she growls.

Shinshu shuts up. It is the closest thing to a miracle that has ever happened in Iruka’s life. Akane wraps the wet plaster-dipped cotton around the layer of dry cotton, humming happily to herself in the silence. After he is fully wrapped she slides her hands up and down the wet cast, the heat of her chakra instantly drying any wet spots.

“Now, you stay here—I need to get you crutches,” she dumps the remaining plaster and cotton onto her cart and leaves the room, still humming.

“That woman is goddamned terrifying,” Shinshu yips in the smallest voice Iruka has ever heard from her.

“What happened to staying quiet? Can we go back to that?” Hatake says, rolling his one visible eye when Shinshu half-heartedly snaps at him.

Iruka leans over and picks her up by the scruff of her neck, shakes her lightly, “Stop that. I’ll tell Ginshu and Akabeni that you’re trying to bite people again. I am sorry, Hatake-san. Shinshu is still young.”

“I’ll show you young,” she growls, yipping when he lightly shakes her again.

Hatake looks between them, amusement crinkling his mask.

Akane returns before they can get into any more trouble, bustling in with the crutches under one arm and a paper bag in one hand. “I got you some low-dose painkillers,” she explains, patting Iruka’s cast to make sure it’s dry. “I numbed it when I wrapped the cast, but that’ll wear off within the next hour or so. And these are your crutches; they should be the proper height, but if they’re not you can adjust them. I expect to see you back within two weeks, anytime during the day.”

Iruka nods, letting Shinshu drop back into Hatake’s lap before grabbing the crutches and bag. Hatake stands when he does, and he handles the fox like she is a small dog, one hand splayed on her chest and another tucked under her rear legs. They walk together out of the hospital.

“Freedom!” Shinshu screams, wiggling her butt until Hatake sets her down. She scampers around them, biting playfully at Iruka’s heels as he gets used to the crutches.

The trip back to Hiruzen’s office doesn’t take long, but only due to the short distance it is from the hospital. Iruka doesn’t slip at all, quickly adapting to the weird, tripod style of walking. Hatake manages to recapture Shinshu before she can escape from them and destroy the village.

The Hokage is behind his desk, once again working on logic puzzles. Shinobu looks at him, disappointed, as she lets Iruka and Kakashi and the fox in. “I’ll send Ibiki, Shikaku, and Inoichi,” she says, pointedly looking from his face to the piles of puzzles.

Hiruzen sighs, nods, and cleans the desk off, shuffling the papers that Iruka had returned with out into full view.

Ibiki arrives first, after Hatake passive-aggressively forces Iruka to sit down, still holding Shinshu like she is a puppy. The interrogator sets up the base tags for a barrier inside the office, but waits until Inoichi and Shikaku to activate it. As soon as the barrier is up, the Hokage speaks.

“As most of you know, Wakahisa-san was sent to obtain some information from the Land of Lightning’s border,” he pauses, “The documents he obtained contain some information that implicate some of our own.”

“Danzo,” Shikaku says, holding out a hand for the papers. “Finally.”

“How much information?” Inoichi asks, peering at the documents as Shikaku skims them. “If there aren’t any strong connections we won’t be able to take action.”

“Those were all the papers I could find,” Iruka says, “but they do hold enough evidence.”

“Particularly if we are able to find his man in Kumogakure. I have sent the Raikage a bird—he is not our staunchest ally, but he has been willing to help us with this so far,” the Hokage adds.

Ibiki gets a look on his face that makes Iruka think of Anko chuckling under her breath and laying poison on senbon. “I am guessing we will wait to place him in custody?” the bulky man asks, sounding thrilled.

Hiruzen catches himself before he rolls his eyes, replies, “Yes, preferably until we have the undercover agent in our hands. Iruka-san—is there anything else that you noticed while you were retrieving this information?”

He feels like there is something—something caught in his mind, but hidden by the depths of snow and forest and far from his immediate memory. “No,” he shakes his head. “Well, maybe, I can’t remember right now.”

“I am sorry for keeping you this long—Kakashi-san, please see him home; you three, we need to plan this carefully—”

Iruka ignores whatever else the old man says, heads for the barrier and the door. Ibiki lets them out before resealing the room, and Shinobu sees them out of the tower. He wasn’t feeling the exhaustion before, but after coming down from his adrenaline high and sitting the Hokage’s toasty office for that long, he is ready to sleep for a literal week.

Hatake is mostly quiet on the way to the compound, only speaking to tell Shinshu that he won’t let her down.

Sasuke is in the large courtyard, setting stuff on fire. It’s—well, it’s not really a surprise at this point. He managed to burn down most of the Uchiha compound while working on some higher-level katon ninjutsu, but now he’s creating flame shuriken and sending them _dangerously_ close to the main house. His respect for Iruka is healthy enough, though, that when Naruto screams, “Iru-tou-san!” and launches himself across the swept stones, he stops.

Iruka fends Naruto off with a crutch, eyes the dark-haired boy, “Were you _trying_ to set the house on fire.”

Sasuke shrugs, “Naruto dared me to.”

“Ma,” Hatake eyes both of them, “weren’t you two assigned to climb trees?”

“Kakashi-sensei?” Naruto says, aghast, “what are you doing here?”

To further the general air of confusion, Shinshu leaps from Hatake’s arms and knocks Naruto down. “Youuuu!” she screeches. “You are so cute! You smell like Ojiisan!”

Half an hour later, Iruka is sitting under the kotatsu and staring blankly out at the inner courtyard, really wishing that Anko was home so she could deal with insanity that is their two adopted sons and their teacher.

Hatake (he should really, really start calling him Kakashi) ultimately does have a reason to be there; Naruto needs help with a complicated seal, and Sasuke is pestering him for katon jutsu. Sakura arrives shortly after, through some feat of telepathy with her teammates, makes tea for Iruka, and then forces Naruto to start practicing water-walking with her on the koi pond. Shinshu watches them, or maybe the fish, and calls out pointers that are pleasantly helpful.

Hata-Kakashi finally orders Sasuke to join his teammates, but before the silver-haired jounin can leave Shinshu weasels her way onto his lap.

Looking bewildered, he asks Iruka, “How do you do this _every day_?”

Iruka raises his head from where he was resting it on the table, “Well, technically they’re now _yours_ every day.”

Heh. That particular look of horror is never going to be replicated.

With a slam, the front amado open and reclose. “Iruka!” yells Anko.

“Yes?” Iruka says in reply, making no move to leave the heat of the kotatsu.

“Ibiki told me something about sen—” she stops as soon as she enters the room, staring out at what Naruto, Sakura, and Sasuke are doing with something like despair in her eyes. Then she sees Hat-Kakashi, and her face lights up. “‘kay, we’re not going to talk about that in present company—but I do know where the tanto is!”

She disappears to the upper floor, and Ha-Kakashi, if possible, looks more bewildered. “Tanto?” he asks Iruka.

“You know, the one that had been repaired,” Iruka replies.

The dots in his mind seem to connect and for the first time since Iruka has talked to him, Kakashi looks to have some semblance of positive emotions gripping him. Anko comes clattering into the room, the tanto in one hand. She gives it to him almost reverently, and he receives it in a similar manner.

They keep silent as he slowly slides the blade from it’s lacquered black sheath, checks the balance and the sharpness. He whips it through the air, trying his best not to disturb the fox on his lap, and a white crackle of chakra shines like a fang. Shinshu stands and gekkers, eyes wide and interested to the point of ignoring the shiba when it enters. Of course—the White Fang of Konoha, just like his father.

Anko breaks from the excitement, bounds out to the courtyard where it sounds like she pushes all three of the genin into the koi pond. “Dinner!” she says brightly, dragging Sasuke after her. Sakura and Naruto follow of their own volition, looking slightly worse for wear. “Misoshiru! And I think we have tofu and negi—no tomatoes!”

Shinshu moves to follow them, but Kakashi grabs her and plops her back down on his lap, keeping a firm hand on the nape of her neck. Ayame, the shiba, sniffs the fox’s face curiously and a little warily. Deciding she is a friend, the dog licks a stripe up her snout, settles down contentedly on Kakashi’s other side. Shinshu doesn’t stop gekkering in annoyance until Sakura and Naruto return and slip under the kotatsu.

“I can bake, but I can’t cook,” Sakura says, voice muffled by her head resting on the table.

“Anko doesn’t trust me with kitchen knives,” Naruto replies gloomily.

Sakura raises her head, peers at him. “That’s understandable.” And her head drops back down with a thunk.

“I’m surprised,” Iruka says so that Kakashi can hear him but the other two can’t. “You seem to have beaten the joy out of them already. It took me two years to do that.”

Kakashi snorts, looks surprised that he snorts. Sakura and Naruto ignore them both, muttering to each other in low voices. Sasuke brings in a pot of tea and cups, and departs quickly when Anko gives a yelp of pain from in the kitchen. She has a habit of thinking she’s invincible to hot pans and pots, and cooking typically ends in burns.

They eat, eventually, Kakashi having been coerced to stay by his students and then escaping as soon as appropriate. Sakura stays over—her parents are on a mission, and she really likes to stay at the Wakahisa house with her boys when she can.

Iruka is beat. Exhausted. Sore as all hell. He lets Anko put out his futon and roll him into it, staying so careful of his cast that she probably thinks it will explode if she touches it.

“Hatake?” she asks when he is tucked under the quilt but still twitching with adrenaline from the past few days.

“‘dunno. Hiruzen made him help me,” Iruka replies, ignoring the fluttering in his chest and the heat of his ears.

Anko hums, runs her hand through his greasy, loose hair. Akane said he could take baths wearing the cast, but he would need to wrap it so as not to get it wet. When he wakes up in the morning, that’s going to be the first thing he does. “Well, he is pretty cute,” she says, a shit-eating grin on her face.

“Go,” Iruka turns bright red, smacks the nearest part of her that he can reach, which is her face. “Fuck—I need sleep, go away.”

She pats his cheek, kisses his forehead, and leaves to make sure the kids stay relatively quiet.

It’s the middle of the night when he awakens and remembers—Hiruzen had asked him if there was anything else about the guard post that he remembered. And there was. It was a little thing, one that he wouldn’t have noticed if he hadn’t had his sensei. There had been two bird perches—an anomaly in itself—and the second had been identified with a small snake. The snake looked like the same one that his sensei had used as a substitute signature; two swirled lines of black ink connected at both ends, with an emerald eye.

He had thought it odd at the time, but had mostly ignored it in favor of getting all the papers sealed. Now that he considers it, it is something that needs to be brought to the Hokage’s attention immediately. If Danzo has connections to Orochimaru—

Grabbing his crutches from where he left them beside his futon, he hobbles to the wall and flicks the light on. It takes longer than he would like to pull his clothes on, but he finishes and moves through the closed engawa until he reaches the room that Anko sleeps in.

She is awake when he opens the shoji, eyes alert and a kunai in one hand. “Iruka?” she asks, pushing out of her futon. “What’s up?”

“We need to go see the Hokage,” he says. “Now.”

Hiruzen is not up when they make it to the Tower, but Shikaku and Ibiki are. Ibiki flickers away to find the Hokage, and Shikaku sets up a new barrier. It’s a small relief that Shinshu is still at the house—if anything happens, she can take care of Naruto and Sasuke and Sakura.

Within ten minutes of their arrival, the Hokage appears.

“You told me to let you know if I remembered anything,” Iruka begins, plowing straight in, “and there is something. That guard post had been receiving birds from Orochimaru.”

Iruka is pretty sure he can hear his old sensei cackling madly from two countries away in the silence that follows. Ibiki looks thoughtful, Shikaku worried. Hiruzen’s face is mostly blank, but his eyes are pinched in a way that makes him look troubled. Anko—Anko looks like she wants to murder something.

“I _knew_ it,” she hisses, whipping around to the Hokage, “we _all_ knew something like this would happen, when you just let him _leave_ Konoha. _Why_ didn’t you kill him when you had the chance!?” Her voice reaches a growling yell with the question, and Shikaku and Hiruzen flinch almost as one. In many ways, Anko is like Orochimaru. They are both unpredictable, moody, and easy to anger.

“Anko!” Iruka snaps, and she calms and looks like a tempest but says no more.

“You are right,” the Hokage finally says, deferring to Anko. “I should have when I had the chance. This—complicates things. Morino-san, if you would take these two back—”

“I expect to know what is happening,” Anko growls, fingers twitching where they rest on her thighs. “You can’t keep everyone out of the dark and expect this to go well.”

Hiruzen sighs, nods once, and looks pointedly at Ibiki.

They go home, Anko somewhat sulkily. Ibiki takes her aside and speaks to her when they get to the courtyard, but Iruka mostly just wants to be back in his futon, where maybe he can forget (he’ll never forget) what just happened. But he slips under the quilt and encounters the warmth of Shinshu, who curls against him and helps his breath even out, and his eyelids are able to close.

A week after getting the cast on, Iruka is, predictably, inside and sitting under the kotatsu. There is work for the Academy that he needs to do, but he also really wants to catch up on his reading before he is swamped by school again. Sasuke and Naruto are with Sakura, training on their own while Kakashi is on a mission. Sakura is pleasantly good with a sword, enough so that she and Sasuke can spar; Iruka has a feeling that they are doing that, but they might also be annoying Kurenai’s team. Anko, as it typical, is on a mission plotting and planning with Ibiki about things that Iruka wants no part in.

He stretches and considers food. Breakfast had been hours ago, and he is beginning to crave okonomiyaki solely for the fact that Anko had come back smelling like it one day. The crutches help him stand, and he wobbles into the kitchen to see what they have. Tomatoes—shoved in the back of the fridge behind the milk and Anko’s chakra-rigged sake—eggs, a half-head of cabbage that is mostly wilted, the last dregs of the snap-peas, and a dozen or so half-full bottles of sauces and condiments.

Iruka grabs a jar of pickled cabbage and eats directly from it as he starts a pan of water for rice. Aimlessly he wanders back into the room he had come out of, abandoning one crutch so he can continue eating the cabbage.

While he reaches for his book on the kotatsu, his chakra sensitivity snaps and chafes, and he feels a familiar white crackle at the base of his neck. He wrestles the jar of pickled cabbage down to the table and turns just in time to feel the air displacement and see Hatake Kakashi appear out of thin air and drop onto the tatami. Iruka waits one second, then two, before moving forward.

And then he curses, because that’s the man’s blood—that’s a lot of his blood pooling on the tatami. Without pausing to think, he drops the crutch and pulls the other man up. His eye is mostly closed, and Iruka gently peels the eyelid back. The dark grey eye is unresponsive, and Iruka lets his chakra take them to the hospital.

Akane is the one who sees him when they first flicker into the hospital, and her face looks murderous. “Wakahisa-san, it’s only been a week!” she begins.

“I am not hurt _please help him_ ,” he interjects before she can reach full steam. Then he half-shoves Kakashi at her, who is still bleeding out but has done a pretty good job of staying on his feet.

She has the time to roll her eyes before her hands light green and she begins shoving what appear to be the man’s intestines back inside his body. Three more medic-nin rush to help her, lifting Kakashi aboard a trolley and maneuvering him toward one of the operating rooms. Iruka shakes himself out of the temporary paralysis that had gripped him, looks down at his clothes. Fucking—blood everywhere. Shit.

Akane appears again, out of nowhere, with a new pair of crutches that she shoves under his arms. “Wakahisa-san, are you all right?” her voice is concerned.

“I’m better than him?” Iruka weakly replies. His mind has forgotten the blood on the tatami, the boiling water on the stove, the open jar of pickled cabbage on the kotatsu.

“Does Mitarashi-san know you’re here?” she asks.

“No—she’s on a mission. Back today,” Iruka says, thoughts far away. Gai—Gai should know that Kakashi’s in the hospital. Other than that, Iruka doesn’t know if Kakashi even _speaks_ to the other nin in the village. Slowly his mind comes back to the present. He remembers the cabbage, the boiling water, the blood.

“I need to go,” he says, with firm determination. “But—uh, I’ll be back. At some point.”

Akane sighs, “I’ll update you with his condition when you do. _Please_ take care of yourself, too.”

She sees him out of the building, still covered in blood, and he heads in the direction of the practice fields. Gai, despite it being a Saturday, will doubtless be out with Lee. And he is, the two practicing advanced katas despite the chill in the air.

The jounin looks concerned by Iruka’s appearance but remains composed when he is informed of Kakashi’s sudden admittance to the hospital, sending Lee off to train on his own before heading off with thanks to the hospital. Iruka slowly makes his way back to his house, mind distant but close enough that he doesn’t get lost.

He goes through the motions of cleaning up, changing his clothes and putting away the cabbage and the water. The blood on the tatami is dried brown rust, and he admits defeat before he even attempts to clean it. There are a couple of shops that make tatami, and the whole house needs new mats anyway. With effort he writes out a list—how many tatami they’ll need made, food they need to buy—but doesn’t get further than that. The kotatsu is still warm, and he is exhausted.

Anko or the kids must have stopped by, because when he wakes up hours later the list is gone, a blanket is draped over him, and a lit lamp hung to give light to the room. It’s still early in the afternoon, but outside the house it is dark with stormclouds. Iruka makes his way to the kitchen, suddenly ravenous after the excitement of the day, and finds no wilted or otherwise almost spoiled food. The kids must have been the ones to stop by—there’s a carton of small grape tomatoes, and Anko would never get them from the market. Fresh fish and meat, a new bag of rice. Greens—lots of greens. Sakura must have been with them as well. Iruka says a prayer of thanks to any god that may be listening for the influence of Sakura in their lives. She’s calm, level-headed, and more intelligent than anyone in their graduating class except for Shikamaru. Hell, there’s books that she reads that Iruka has never dreamed of even touching for their complexity. She’s been accumulating books on everything from poison to spinal surgery in the house’s mostly-empty library.

Iruka begins making food, dragging a pot out to go on the hot plate. Hotpot has always been one of his favorite foods, but with the gradual increasing chaos of their winters, he hadn’t been able to prepare it for several years. While he is slicing mushrooms, Naruto, Sakura and Sasuke reappear, with more fabric bags full of food.

“Ehh, Iru-tou-san, whose blood is on the tatami?” Naruto, of course, asks immediately.

“Your sensei’s,” Iruka replies, not looking up from the growing mound of shiitake.

Sakura drops the two daikon she was placing in a cool cupboard in one corner of the kitchen. “Kakashi-sensei?” she asks, concerned. “That was a lot of blood, though!”

“He’s at the hospital, and I’m sure you’ll be able to ask him what happened when he wakes up,” Iruka says automatically, grabbing his tomatoes and setting them out of reach of Sasuke’s wandering hands.

The three teens finish packing away the food in worried silence, and leave for the inner garden when Iruka shoos them out of the kitchen.

It’s—it’s normal, when nin get back from missions, for them to be hurt. Iruka knows it’s normal. The kids know it’s normal. He understands why they’re freaked out—after all, it has just been a week since he came back injured. Kakashi seems invincible. But that still doesn’t completely explain the hot, white terror that Iruka was feeling for the man when he appeared inside the house.

He ignores it—tries to ignore it. Anko returns, and they eat a subdued meal before the kids leave again, going to train at the Inuzuka compound with their year-mates.

When they clean up the dinner dishes, it feels like it did before Naruto came to live with them; two lonely kids in the wake of tragedy. They wrap themselves in quilts and sit out next to the pond, Iruka’s head on Anko’s lap, drinking sake warmed by a cloud of Iruka’s steam ninjutsu.

“Eh, Iruka, your medic friend found me,” Anko says after some time spent in contemplative silence. “She said Hatake-san made it out of surgery and he’s doing all right. Not awake yet.”

Iruka sighs in reply, a sigh of relief that compresses all of the tension in his shoulders that he didn’t know was there and expels it from his body. Anko runs a hand through his loose hair, dances her fingers across the freckles that are patterned across his face.

“You like him?” she asks.

“I like him,” he admits. It’s strange that he does; Kakashi has always been weirdly stilted in his treatment of Iruka, like he respects him and yet is puzzled by him. In fact, their first real conversation had taken place the week before, when he had been coerced to stay for dinner. “Don’t know why.”

“C’mon, ‘ruka,” Anko squishes his cheeks and huffs, looking out at the koi. “He’s tall and mysterious and for some reason he keeps hanging around you.” She says, quieter, annoyed, “We should call you irukandji because you give me a constant sense of impending doom.”

Iruka snorts, drains his shallow cup. He closes his eyes as Anko plays with his hair, braiding and unbraiding, twisting the soft strands through her fingers. It may be vain of him, but he loves his hair. It’s the exact shade his mother’s was, though not coarse or curly as her hair had been, but it reminds him of her in a pleasant, nostalgic way.

The next two days he has to go to the Academy and work out what, exactly, he is going to be teaching his kids for the next year. It is menial work, and thankful doesn’t take much thinking because he feels frazzled and restless. Suzume and a couple of the other teachers are there as well, trying to catch up on work before they inevitably fall back behind.

He finishes up quickly on the second day—before lunch. Knowing that he had a mission inspired him to finish most of his work before the end of winter term. His new class is easier to handle than Naruto’s class had been, though not by much. Konohamaru, Hiruzen’s grandson, seems set on giving him a run for his money, but other than that the kids are relatively quiet and normal. It’s almost a relief, but still feels weird.

After leaving the Academy, he vaguely considers stopping by the hospital, but Anko intercepts him and babbles something about helping Ibiki, dragging him along behind her when he can’t follow the speed of her talking. They descend into the basement under the Hokage’s office, where for the next two hours Ibiki makes him explain the specifics of Orochimaru’s teachings that Anko can’t remember.

He leaves Ibiki’s public torture pit feeling a little like his brain has been smashed by an extremely large and extremely heavy hammer. Anko leaves him to find his way out by himself, aided only by his crutches and the last iota of power remaining in his brain.

Okonomiyaki is all he wants. He’s not going back to the compound, anyway, because Sakura was convincing the boys to let her work on medical ninjutsu, and he really doesn’t want to be involved in that.

Iruka finds the okonomiyaki shop and orders to go, easily carrying the bag in addition to using his crutches. To his annoyance, he is waylaid right upon stepping out of the shop, not by Anko or the kids, but by Gai.

“Ah, Iruka-san,” the jounin says, sounding almost relieved. “Good. I was wondering if you could come with me?”

Iruka sighs, nods, and follows the man, who remains uncharacteristically quiet as they walk through the streets. Predictably, they end up at the hospital, where Gai pauses outside of a room on the ground level. He thinks for a moment, chooses his words carefully when he speaks, “As you probably know, Kakashi is admirably stubborn. He is refusing to stay here despite his ill health and injury.” Iruka waits expectantly as Gai pauses again. “I was hoping you, in your experience, could talk some sense into him.”

Iruka sighs again. Without even knowing it, he has become the go-to person for basically any and all crises in the village. “I’ll try,” he says somewhat darkly, “but there are no guarantees.” He pushes into the room.

Kakashi is sitting on the edge of the bed, wearing clothes are are neither bloodstained nor torn. His head is between his knees, his breathing harsh.

Shuffling quietly in, Iruka groaned to himself.

“I have no doubt that Gai and the medics have told you this, but you are an _idiot_ ,” he says dryly to the man, letting the door gently close behind him.

Kakashi’s head snaps up with such speed it’s a wonder he doesn’t get whiplash. “Iruka-san?” his voice is shaky.

“Yes,” Iruka says in a long-suffering tone. He drops the bag of boxed up okonomiyaki into the chair next to the bed, stays standing and stares at Kakashi. “What are you doing?” he demands.

The jounin makes a short, abortive gesture toward the door, says, “I have to go.”

Iruka, in lieu of slamming his head against the wall, rubs his eyes and wills the headache building up behind them away. “Kakashi-san, there’s nothing you need to do—your team is training at my hopefully still-standing house, the Hokage doesn’t need your report yet, Anko has managed to successfully _not_ burn down the Academy complex, and Gai has already done thirty laps around the village. That I know of.”

That does a pretty effective job of shutting the other man up.

He huffs, takes the okonomiyaki off the chair and sets it on the table, eases himself down into the chair. The day has so far included much more walking than he expected.

“Why—are you here?” Kakashi eventually asks, thoroughly cowed and surprisingly docile.

Iruka shrugs, pulls out the takeout boxes. He was planning on keeping some for lunch the next day (or dinner, if Sakura was still beating up the boys), but Kakashi looks so depressed  that he pities him. “It has eggplant,” he says, passing one box to the man. “Gai asked me if I would come.”

Kakashi cocks his head, but readily accepts the box and the chopsticks that Iruka hands to him. “Why would he do that?”

“Because you are an idiot?”

The jounin stays quiet, looks slightly annoyed.

Iruka sighs. “Sorry. He’s just worried about you. To be honest, I’m worried, too,” he points his chopsticks at the other man, “two days ago you were bleeding out on _my_ tatami, and I got to see your intestines.”

His eyebrows wrinkle almost imperceptibly. “Your tatami?”

“You flickered into my house,” Iruka pauses in between bites of the blessed, beautiful okonomiyaki. “You...also do not remember that, probably.”

Somehow, a third of Kakashi’s own food is gone and the man hasn’t removed his face mask, but Iruka doesn’t care. He looks vaguely worried, though.

There’s a soft tapping on the door, and Akane sticks her head in, looking thoroughly annoyed and exhausted. “Ah, Wakahisa-san!” she brightens slightly when she sees him. “Visiting Hatake-san?”

“Obviously.”

“Right,” she ignores his tone and steps into the room, heading straight for Kakashi, who looks like he’s going to be sick or run away. “Hatake, after some thorough examination of your condition, I and the others have agreed that you _may_ leave.” The man looks immensely gladdened, but that dims when she continues. “But! You are still in very delicate condition. We would prefer if you stayed with someone in case there are any complications and you cannot make it back to the hospital on your own.”

He looks pained, turns toward the door, “Gai…?”

“Alas, my youthful rival, I cannot,” the green-clothed man looks concerned, but his flowery language is back so Iruka decides he’s fine. “I am taking my most energetic team out on a mission.”

The three of them, as one, turn to look at Iruka. He sighs again, and this is the most he has sighed in one day since...ever. “Fine, fine. I’ll ask Sakura to stay over just in case.”

Akane gives him a thumbs-up at almost the exact time Gai makes the same gesture, “Thank you so much, Wakahisa-san! That gives me peace of mind.”

After getting Kakashi checked out of the hospital, Iruka body-flickers them into the Wakahisa compound. Sakura is bundled up and sitting on the front step, watching Sasuke and Naruto punch each other with varying degrees of success.

“Iruka-sensei? Kakashi-sensei?” the girl asks hesitantly when they appeared. The two boys continue punching.

“Ah, Sakura,” Iruka feels relieved that she is still there, “would you be able to stay over tonight?”

Surprisingly, nothing goes wrong. Kakashi is basically a highly-functioning zombie, and he immediately passes out as soon as he is given a futon and a quiet room. Anko returns, late that night, to find Iruka still awake and agonizing over basically his entire existence.

“Yo,” is the first thing she says to him, followed by, “Why is Hatake passed out in the other room?”

Iruka lets his head drop, with a thunk, onto the top of the kotatsu. “Akane. And Gai.”

“‘ruka, that’s no explanation,” she sits down across from him with a carton of noodles and beef in peanut sauce, “did you have really crazy sex while I was gone?”

A vein throbs in his forehead. He has to take deep breaths—several deep breaths. “ _No_. Good gods,” he says. “What is with you and me and Hatake?”

Anko looks at him seriously, but can’t seem to come up with a reply that doesn’t involve snorting laughter. Eventually she calms enough to squeak out, “Threesomes!” before dissolving back into laughter so hard she isn’t making noise.

Iruka can’t really help the laughter starting in his own throat. Anko saw the chance, and she took it.

The next few days are uneventful. Iruka has more work at the mission room because half of the other workers are sick, so he doesn’t really see Kakashi. Or the kids. Or Anko. It’s almost a relief, but it also stresses him out. The school breaks are the only time when he can really spend time with his family (plus Sakura, but she’s really part of the Wakahisa household now) but he hasn’t been able to.

Speaking of Sakura, though, Sasuke and Naruto begin pestering him about offering honorary clan membership to Sakura because, though she technically still lives with her parents, she spends most days and nights at the Wakahisa house. Iruka happens to agree with his adopted sons, so on the last day of the break he stops by the Haruno house after he ends his early morning shift in the mission room to talk to Kizashi and Mebuki.

Thankfully, Sakura’s parents agree. She’ll still be their daughter (gods know that Iruka has two children too many, anyway), she’ll just have the same status as Naruto and Sasuke. An added bonus, in the Haruno’s eyes, is that she can just stay at the Wakahisa compound all the time as opposed to most of the time. Kizashi and Mebuki, Iruka knows, are  shinobi, often gone on missions and leaving Sakura home alone.

The girl fits perfectly into their various routines, balancing out Naruto and Sasuke’s shenanigans, gladly having hot springs time with Anko (where, Anko feels the need to  tell him, they talk a lot about silent killing techniques) and generally helping around the house. It is also more convenient for training, though Kakashi still shows up at non-consistent hours in the morning.

It’s a few more months and Naruto, Sakura and Sasuke are going to be in the chuunin exams. It’s strange. Iruka feels like it has just been a couple of months since the two boys came to live with him and Anko, but it has been years and they are ready for it. More than ready for it. Most of the other genin are entering the exams as well, and as such it is convenient that Hiruzen successfully lobbied for them to be in Konoha.

Iruka doesn’t need to do anything. It’s a relief, as he has enough to be stressed about. Well, he does suspect that he will be playing a role in instructing Kakashi’s team, but he doesn’t really understand _why_ because Kakashi is supposed to be in Konoha.

He finds the other man after school one day, on his way to the mission room for a two hour shift.

“Kakashi-san,” he says, flagging the man down before he can leave the vicinity of the building.

“Iruka-san?” Kakashi pauses, tucks the book he had been reading away.

“The Hokage came to me about the chuunin exams and said you wouldn’t be able to advise your team,” Iruka explains.

Kakashi sighs, a long-suffering, belabored sigh. “He’s having me do some, uh, undercover stuff. Just in case,” and Iruka can tell that he really, _really_ appreciates having to do that.

“But aren’t you supposed to instruct your own team?” he asks, head cocked as the other man walks with him into the mission room.

“Well, I do plan to get out of it,” Kakashi shrugs.

“How?” Iruka knows—Kakashi knows—that when it came to the chuunin exams Konoha tends to be perpetually a little short-staffed.

Kakashi grins, wide enough to see through his mask, shrugs, and replies, “Same thing as I always do, talk my way out of it.” He holds a hand up in parting, and flickers away.

The kids seem to think it is warm enough for popsicles, despite there being snow only two weeks before, which is what they are eating when Iruka gets back after work. Sakura is reading a medical publication, her head resting on Ino’s lap, and occasionally kicking Naruto in the back when he gets too loud. Sasuke is pressed against Naruto, trying and rather failing to work through a tough series of hand-signs off a scroll. Kiba and Akamaru don’t even acknowledge Iruka’s arrival from where they’re laying next to Shikamaru, who is cloud-watching. Choji comes out from the kitchen with more popsicles.

“Don’t any of you need to be training?” Iruka asks, and relishes when Sasuke and Naruto slam into each other, Sakura chucks her papers into Ino’s face, and Akamaru begins running in alarmed circles.

“Maah, Iruka-sensei,” Shikamaru lazily looks down, “Asuma-sensei said he had paperwork to do.”

“Kurenai-sensei was helping the Hokage with something,” Kiba adds, sitting blearily up. “And we were bored, so we came here.”

“I don’t even know where Kakashi-sensei is,” Sakura says, shrugs. “It’s normal, really.”

Kakashi appears _right then_ in the middle of their little, lazy gathering, without preface. Ino and Sakura shriek and grab each other, and both Kiba and Sasuke have kunai in their hands. The positive of Iruka’s chakra-sensing ability is that he could tell the man was coming, and so could have warned the kids. Fuck if that wasn’t hilarious, though.

Ignoring the teens in various states of fight-or-flight, Kakashi turns to Iruka, smugly says, “I got out of it. You won’t have to skip teaching.”

Iruka rolls his eyes, “Thanks. Maybe, next time, just let me do it.”

“Kakashi-sensei, what are you doing here?” Naruto demands. “You said we didn’t have training today!”

His one eye rolls. “I needed to talk to your father. If it bothers you that much, I’ll leave.”

“Wait, Kakashi-sensei!” Sasuke interrupts, “why are all of the jounin sensei’s busy now?”

Iruka is so familiar with the man’s expressions that he can instantly identify the smug look that takes over his face. “That is not for you to know yet,” is all he says before he body-flickers away.

“Iruka-sensei,” Sakura says, and the seven kids and one dog all turn to stare at him. “Do you know?”

Iruka has to breathe deeply so he won’t laugh at the intensity on all of their faces. “Can’t tell you. Be patient.” And he flees inside before the teens can react.

They only have that night to pester him for the truth, because the next day the Hokage announces the chuunin exams and the jounin inform their teams. Kakashi, at the behest of his team, trains them until later than usual. This means that the four of them, exhausted, show up when Iruka is carefully dripping hot sauce into a sleeping Anko’s mouth. She got him with the ink-on-the-fingers prank a couple weeks before, so he figures it is time for payback.

Kakashi amusedly watches him add a final dab of wasabi to Anko’s upper lip before he skitters back into the kitchen with the bottle of hot sauce and tube of wasabi.

There’s leftover yakisoba for the kids and their teacher, and Iruka makes a pot of tea specifically for the aftermath of his prank. Anko is a surprisingly good sport about it, but they’ve been pranking each other since their genin days, so it is no longer a surprise when it happens.

Kakashi continues training his team for long days for the two week until the exams start, giving them plenty of rest days but working them hard. Hayate helps Sasuke finish up some of his sword training, Sakura devours more books and forces the boys to let her practice more medical ninjutsu on them, and Naruto does whatever Naruto does (meaning, fails a lot until he succeeds). Hiruzen gets a letter from Jiraiya, saying that his former student will be visiting during the chuunin exams because, as the Hokage confided in Iruka one day when they were working the mission desk together, he had heard some intel about the exams that he couldn’t disclose over a letter.

The morning of the first stage of the exam, Iruka is helping Suzume and Ebisu with some filing in the teacher’s room. Anko had to leave early for debriefing, as she is the overseer of the second stage. Iruka is organizing files by last name, alphabetical, when he feels a slight aching twinge in the thick muscle between his neck and his shoulder. He ignores it, continues working until the pain lances through his shoulder straight to the base of his neck and he collapses.

Upon first waking up his sight is filled with a lovely view up Suzume’s nostrils. She’s talking to Ebisu in a loud, worried tone, but the words sound all jumbled and loose to Iruka’s brain. He tries to focus on her, successfully manages it in time to hear her say, “We’re going to the Hokage’s office, Iruka-san, please hold on.”

She body-flickers them straight into Hiruzen’s office, which is also a scene of chaos.

Anko is on the floor, gripping her shoulder (the same side, same spot that Iruka felt twinge) and still unconscious. Ibiki is in the middle of coordinating a team of ANBU to set up a barrier, and the Hokage himself is down on his knees next to Anko, talking worriedly with another ANBU.

“Iruka!” Hiruzen exclaims upon their arrival. “Suzume-san, what happened?”

Suzume explains, in barest details, before leaving again back to the Academy, shadowed by one of the ANBU who had been erecting the barrier, which has been abandoned.

Anko wakes up, fingernails embedded in the skin around her seal. “Sensei,” she says, sounding disbelieving and shaky, “he’s here.”

Hiruzen considers them, looks concerned at Iruka, “I can understand the reaction of Anko’s cursed seal, but, Iruka…”

Iruka feels horrified. He could and can feel Orochimaru’s chakra chafing against his own, vicious and angry, but he _knew_ that only Anko had a cursed seal, there was no way he could have one—

“I-I need to—” he stammers out, hesitates, and takes off through the window.

He can feel the flicker of white, crackling chakra that is Kakashi following him. The distant part of Iruka’s brain that isn’t focused on getting back to the compound is reasoning that he must have been one of the ANBU, and followed at the Hokage’s orders.

The house is empty, the kids gone to the exams and Anko still in Hiruzen’s office. He tears up the stairs to his room of pictures, slamming the door behind him. A barrier and a wall of traps build themselves as he searches with crazed fervor among the photo albums atop the dresser.

Anko was obsessed with taking pictures—documenting everything she could following their placement as a genin team. He has one album solely dedicated to the pictures she took in those few years, and that is the one he blindly grabs for. It is dust ridden, unopened for over a decade.

He twitches when Kakashi’s chakra meets his. The other man is outside the door, a hand pressed to it despite the needle-like pain of the barrier. “Iruka-san,” he says, several times with urgency, “Iruka-san!”

Iruka ignores him, flips through the photos, searching.

And he finds it. A picture, taken by Anko, of him and a turned-away Yasu holding fishing poles and not wearing shirts while on one of their weekend excursions. He is turned in such a way that his shoulder is exposed, and three miniscule, curves lines are visible in the same spot as Anko’s. His mind feels distant, then suddenly back, in his house, inside the locked room with all the pictures on the wall.

He is distantly aware of Kakashi cursing, pressing both of his hands against the door, saying in a quieter tone, “Damn it, Iruka.”

With shaking fingers, he draws the photograph out of the album, still unable to look away from it. The chakra forming the barrier melts away and returns to him, and Kakashi presses through the unlocked and unguarded door.

“Iruka—” he stops up short.

(and Iruka’s brain congratulates itself, because he is wearing his dog-mask and dull armor, the red swirl on his upper arm in full view)

“We need to go,” Iruka says, closing the album and forcing himself upright. “Now, we need to go,” he repeats, holding out his hand.

Kakashi hesitates, grabs his hand, and they body-flicker as one back into the Hokage’s office, where Anko is sitting in a chair and Hiruzen is staring out of the window. Jiraiya arrives as they do, looking moody and irritated.

Hiruzen turns, doesn’t really seem to know who he wants to talk to first, so Iruka holds out the picture.

“It’s the opposite,” he manages to say, trying to consider the words before they just fall out of his mouth. He knows about the seal; Orochimaru derived some odd pleasure out of discussing his work with his students. But he doesn’t know when he got the seal, doesn’t remember, and doesn’t recall seeing it the last time he looked at himself in the mirror. “Of Anko’s—the Cursed Seal of Earth.”

Anko’s nose crinkles, “But—when could he have…?”

“What is this?” Jiraiya butts his way in, takes the picture and inspects it. His face goes grave when he sees the markings. As one of Orochimaru’s oldest friends, he knows what the three-pronged symbols mean. “Ah, a cursed seal, one of Orochimaru’s.”

Hiruzen speaks, retaking the picture from his former student, “He never successfully wiped the events from Anko-san’s memory. Maybe he succeeded with you, Iruka.”

That would explain it. Iruka doesn’t exactly know what to believe.

“But he is here,” Anko insists, sitting upright.

“That—” Jiraiya pauses and looks from her to the Hokage, “that is true. That is the reason I came. You asked me to be on the lookout for suspicious activity that might concern him. I have intercepted communications from the Land of Sound and the Kazekage that I believe came from Orochimaru.”

Hiruzen pauses him, points to Kakashi, “Get Ibiki, I don’t care if they’re still in the middle of the exam. Shinobu!”

The woman sticks her head in, “Yes, Hokage-sama?”

“Find Shikaku, he should be in the building somewhere,” he instructs, “And get the sealing unit up here as soon as possible.”

Shinobu nods, leaves with all speed. Within five minutes, all the nin that Hiruzen wanted are standing in the office, and Iruka feels overwhelmed and claustrophobic. He barely notices when Kakashi steers him into a seat and remains behind him, a reassuring hand on his shoulder.

Hiruzen waits until someone sets a barrier up around the perimeter of the room before speaking, “Orochimaru has been confirmed to be within Konoha at this time.” Ibiki hisses, reaches for Anko’s shoulder. “We will proceed with the extraction plan that you have been developing,” the Hokage nods to Ibiki and Anko, who sits straighter, “and nothing that has been said here will exit this room.”

“Extraction?” Iruka asks cautiously.

Ibiki explains, “Anko and I have been working on a method of extracting the chakra in Orochimaru’s cursed seals that will render the seal inert, and therefore cause it to—”

“Destroy itself,” Anko finishes. “But we’ve never done it before, and what if something goes wrong?”

Hiruzen considers them with full seriousness, “I will take any and all responsibility. Go to the network behind the monument; it is secure. If we do this right, we can deal with all of our problems in the coming days.”

With that, the barrier is brought down and most of them leave as a unit for the Hokage Monument. They lose a couple ANBU, but Kakashi remains in pace with Iruka.

The sealing unit seems to know what is going to happen, because they take up specific places in the chamber that the group stops in. Anko strips off her shirt, and apologetically tells Iruka that he has to as well.

“Ibiki,” she says, placing a hand on the man’s arm, “I will go first. If there are any complications, make sure I am cut off from my chakra.”

The man grimaces slightly, nods. Anko takes up a stance akin to meditation seating in the center of the room, and the sealing unit circle her, seated as well. Ibiki faces her in the circle, and the nin forming the circle clasp hands and begin whatever technique they are using to neutralize the juinjutsu.

It takes a long time. Iruka can feel the push and pull of Anko’s chakra, the sealers’ chakra, Orochimaru’s chakra. It is faint, but present, and crackles angrily in Iruka’s mind. Despite Anko’s disclaimer that something might go wrong, nothing does, and after what feels like days—but in reality was likely an hour or two—her eyes snap open, and a pillar of red-purple chakra burns off of her shoulder. She is shaking, but alive and steady on her feet when she stands. Ibiki helps her sit where Iruka is waiting, before beckoning him into the circle.

Kakashi, when he nervously stands, squeezes his shoulder one last time. “You’ll be fine,” he says.

The sussurus of snakes is overpowering, once the sealers have started. It begins faint, but mounts and, frankly, freaks Iruka the hell out. It sounds familiar, in a hazy way, and as he sits within the circle he begins to remember how he got the seal.

Iruka had been his favorite student.

Anko had been the first, the one out of ten to survive the test of the procedure. Iruka had been next, one out of ten, and Orochimaru was convinced it would work, that he would succeed. He would not waste his prized student otherwise. Yasu had no knowledge of either of the seals, of any of Orochimaru’s tests at that time, and it was easy enough for their sensei to say they each needed to spend the weekend training on their own.

It had hurt like hell. Given that the application was only a success ten percent of the time (which was not a statistic that Iruka knew, at the time), it was a given that it would hurt. It left him feeling raw and burnt out, but it had worked. Orochimaru had succeeded in giving his favorite one of the most powerful of his cursed seals.

Iruka feels that burning again, but this time it feels cleansing. The part of his chakra that he didn’t know as tainted is burnt out, and when his eyes snap open his mind is clear and he feels more himself than he has in over a decade.

Anko is already gone, already preparing for the second stage of the chuunin exams with her team of ANBU and other jounin, though the test will not begin until the next day. The sealing team depart as one, and when Iruka finally makes it out of the secret cavern behind the First’s head with Kakashi and Ibiki, the sun is beginning its slow descent into the west.

At Ibiki’s behest (and really feeling like he needs something to eat) Iruka follows the other men back to the Hokage’s office.

Jiraiya is still there, looking through documents with Shikaku. They ignore the three men when they enter, but Hiruzen looks up from his work.

“Success, Hokage-sama,” Ibiki says, and the bulky man looks exhausted from how much chakra it had taken to destroy the seals.

Hiruzen nods sharply, “You are free to go, Ibiki. Get some rest, and report here at dawn.

(Iruka quietly wonders if the old man has been getting any sleep, or any rest for that matter)

“Kakashi,” he turns his attention to the still-masked man at Iruka’s side, “You will watch over Iruka-san until further notice. In the case of your genin team, I will find someone to advise them tomorrow.”

Kakashi nods, porcelain dog mask bobbing with the movement. He offers a hand to Iruka, a mirror of their motions earlier, and body-flickers them back into the Wakahisa compound.

Sasuke is in the process of making dinner, and Naruto and Sakura are going over their weapons in the main room. Kakashi immediately removes his mask, slipping the porcelain into his secondary weapons pouch where it won’t be damaged. Naruto barely acknowledges them, but Sakura looks up, eager.

“We passed, sensei!” she says, and Iruka wonders when the kids just started to expect Kakashi to come home with him. That thought makes his stomach flip-flop.

“Of course,” Kakashi says, waving a hand. “If you hadn’t, I would have abandoned you.”

Sasuke comes in with a tray of dishes and food, kitsune udon, enough for all of them. The five of them manage to sit at the low table, despite soreness and anxiety and still-thrumming nerves. Naruto and Sakura and Sasuke tell them about the exam—it was a sit-down, read-questions-and-answer test, but Iruka already knew that and he feels like Kakashi did, too. Naruto knew several answers, and he is very proud of that. Sakura filled out the entire thing in moments, but that isn’t really a surprise. Sasuke, after being asked several times, finally admits that he used his sharingan to copy Sakura’s movements, because he knew that she knew all the answers. Sakura blushes pink with pride, and gives him a noogie that sends his black hair into disarray.

Iruka can begin to feel the strain of undergoing a large-scale chakra scrub by the time they are done with dinner and Sakura and Naruto are cleaning up. Kakashi temporarily flickers back to his own apartment to grab some clothes, returning within moments.

Continuing their confusing trend of being absolutely fine with Kakashi staying in the house, Sasuke drags Naruto off to prepare a room for him while Sakura makes Iruka some much-needed tea.

The kids go back outside when all of that is done, and begin going through their katas in tandem. Ibiki’s summon, a red-faced, winged tengu, drops from the sky and waddles into the house through the front shoji. Iruka has met the odd-looking summon before, and it doesn’t seem to be in a hurry so he stays relaxed.

“My brat is keeping your sister overnight,” the tengu says, looking distractedly around. “She passed out like she was drunk, she did.”

“Thank you,” is really the only thing Iruka can think to say. The monster flicks its long nose and puffs out a breath.

“That’s all,” the tengu says, lets its wings flap idly as it walks back outside of the house and speeds into the air.

Kakashi drums his fingers on the chabudai, says wryly, “You got new tatami.”

Iruka grin-grimaces at that. “We got _all_ new tatami. Naruto wouldn’t stop complaining about the smell of them for two solid weeks when they were new.” Sakura had enjoyed it, and Sasuke frankly had not given a damn.

“He tends to do that,” Kakashi sighs, helps himself to some tea. Iruka is thankful for this, mostly because Anko refuses to commiserate with him.

And Iruka doesn’t get to see Anko until the second part of the exam is over, by which time he has learned that Kakashi absolutely hates fried foods and also anything with sugar in it. They get along really well, though Kakashi is still awkward around him at times, and at the worst moments Iruka’s brain decides to say “man, he’s _really_ hot,” but they manage to survive for the next four days.

Following the discussion in the Hokage’s office, there is no sign of Orochimaru. The nin from both the Land of Sound and the Land of Wind are watched closely, as are several Konoha nin that Jiraiya has suspicions about, but Iruka and Kakashi officially have nothing to do with that.

Officially, though, all of the Sound nin don’t make it through Anko’s preliminary rounds following the craziness that was their ordeal in the Forest of Death. Kakashi’s team makes it, as do most of the other Konoha nin (apart from Tenten, Lee, and Hinata, and Iruka wishes he could find Hiashi and give him a stern talking-to) which gives Iruka some peace of mind. He knows that Kakashi’s team can become chuunin; the hours that they have put in training, even on their own, are more than most other nin of their age.

Despite Anko’s exhausted return to the house, Kakashi stays at the Hokage’s behest. There is a month-long break until the next and final stage of the exams, and a lot can happen in a month.

That is not to say that it does, however.

The most that Iruka knows happens is Kakashi teaches Sasuke several lightning jutsu and Naruto meets Jiraiya. Which, potentially, could have ended with the world splitting in two, but it didn’t so Iruka’s fine that. Jiraiya takes it upon himself to train Naruto to summon, which means that Naruto is gone for most of the month.

Sasuke, when not practicing raiton, is mostly asleep or sparring with Sakura. Sakura, out of the three of them, is actually at the house most of the time. She does disappear with Anko occasionally, and spends a lot of time practicing medical ninjutsu and resurrecting freshly-dead fish.

Iruka, though, has school to teach and lessons to plan. Kakashi shadows him basically everywhere, hanging around when he has to stay late at the Academy and carrying his groceries when it’s his turn to get them. It feels...normal, after a while.

Normal, but shaken up again when the last part of the chuunin exam begins.

It’s summer break at the Academy—solely scheduled so that siblings and families can watch the final stage. Arena fights, which Iruka is not a fan of, but he is glad for the exams to be close to over.

Anko, Kakashi and he go as a unit to the exam, though not completely as audience members. Jiraiya, through the myriad of undercover skills he has, managed to find even more intel suggesting that Orochimaru had been forced to delay, but would make his move at the final phase of the exam. So they are really there as nin of Konoha, though Hiruzen was leery about allowing Anko and Iruka to participate in any potential battles with their former sensei.

(which Anko swiftly countered with, “Then _you_ shouldn’t be fighting either! He’s your former student!” which earned a sigh and a weary nod from the old man)

Iruka is nervous, but ready. In fact, he is more nervous about watching his kids fight than he was about any potential wars that might come of the exams. There are some strange match-ups; Sakura is fighting one of the Suna nin, Naruto is scheduled to fight Neji, and Sasuke another of the Suna nin, reportedly the container of the One-tails. That is the fight most of the spectators are whispering about, but they talk excitedly about most of the matches.

Hayate and Genma split announcing duties, while also trying to keep the contestants from trying to preemptively hurt each other. Naruto and Neji are the first, and the hilarity almost kills Iruka when Neji first activates his byakugan and is temporarily blinded by the sheer size and scale of Naruto’s chakra pathways. Being on good terms with the Nine-tails gives the boy some rather unique advantages, particularly over a byakugan user. He has so much chakra that even Neji’s use of Gentle Fist style doesn’t do much to slow him down.

It is a surprise, though, when Naruto does win. The crowd goes insane, more for the fact that the fight was overwhelmingly intense, and only quiets to hear that Sasuke is the next to fight.

Sasuke looks way more stressed than Iruka has ever seen him, but seems ready, calm. He ignores the raucous chanting of the crowd, focuses on the red-haired boy who looks like death.

And then everything goes to hell.

Someone—a man wearing a black cloak—sets off a genjutsu and two smoke bombs go off. Iruka easily breaks out of the genjutsu, as do most of the other nin, including the genin. Kakashi immediately heads down to where Gai is to team up, and Anko and Iruka go back to back and flicker in tandem up to the roof, where Orochimaru and Hiruzen’s chakra signatures are.

There are four nin atop the roof, in the already protected corners of a barrier that they are almost finished building. Iruka motions for the ANBU to stay back from the barrier, which looks to be a pretty nasty one, and yells for Anko to cover him as he begins a futton jutsu.

The hand-signs fly from his fingers, and end with a clap. Three water towers, the closest and largest in all of Konoha, burst, condensing into a strange fog that he manipulates with his mind. The barrier that Orochimaru’s lackeys have set up is complete, so he directs the flow of the water to it, sending the levels of acidity high enough to destroy pure chakra.

The fog eats away at the barrier, melting small holes that grow larger as seconds pass. In under a minute, there’s a hole large enough for a person to fit through, and four ANBU flit through the barrier.

Iruka tries to keep aware of the fighting around him, though he doesn’t really need to with Anko guarding him. Kakashi and Gai are incapacitating the man who was posing as a genin, Kabuto, while most of the others are fighting various nin from the Land of Sound. The nin from the Land of Wind are largely surrendered, and Iruka thinks that they probably didn’t know about the death of the Kazekage after they agreed to Orochimaru’s invasion plan.

Orochimaru’s summons, the massive three-headed snake that Iruka has never seen before, is engaged by Jiraiya, who seems to think that a legitimate course of action to take is toying with the monstrous beast.

After the ANBU are through, he turns the focus of his fog on the four still-protected nin in the corners of the dissolving barrier. One, a red-headed woman, breaks free from the barrier and makes an attempt to flee, but is easily caught by Hana Inuzuka and her ninken. The next, a larger man with creepily dead eyes, is taken down by Hana’s mother, Tsume.

The last two, a man with four arms and another with two heads, do manage to get out of Iruka’s mist. Instead of letting the mist follow them itself, he manipulates it from afar, increasing its speed enough to catch the two-headed one, who dies what can only be called a grisly death.

He would go after the four-armed one, but he is suddenly exhausted and brought back to what is happening with Orochimaru, namely because the man himself howls, “Iruka!”

The sannin is almost restrained by the ANBU and Hiruzen, one of his arms dangling at a painful angle and the other smeared with blood. Iruka flinches back, the cloud of fog returning to him and surrounding him like a protective shell.

Orochimaru breaks abruptly free, sprinting at a nearly impossible to follow speed toward him. Iruka flinches back again, digs his hands into the water surrounding him, and wills himself calm. If there is one thing that his old sensei never got to know about him, it was the techniques he knows.

He claps his hands together again, and they blur with handsigns. If his mother was there, she would kill him for using such a high level forbidden technique.

With two quick waves of his arms, one after the other, he takes control over the very moisture in the air surrounding Orochimaru.

With a third wave, ending with his palms flat on the broken tiles of the roof, he takes control over the moisture in Orochimaru’s body, his very blood, and sends the man flat onto his stomach.

Hiruzen flies forward, burying his sword into the small of his former student’s back. The ANBU squad follow, laying upon him with seals as well.

Orochimaru coughs, blood spraying from his stretching mouth, but he dies before anything comes of it. He dies staring at Iruka, face grotesquely contorted.

Thankfully, right after that Iruka passes out.

He comes to in a hospital bed, which is alarming. Sakura is asleep at the end of his bed, and Kakashi is similarly passed out in one of the chairs.

Perhaps feeling his chakra jump, Kakashi flails awake, nearly knocking himself over in the process.

“How long?” Iruka asks, wincing at the harshness of his voice.

“The exams were yesterday, so around fourteen hours,” Kakashi guesses. He rubs the inside of his visible eye, looks exhausted.

“What happened?”

The jounin sighs, runs a hand through his hair, “Orochimaru is dead, Kabuto—that’s his operative here in Konoha—has been neutralized and is in the care of Ibiki, Naruto and most of the other genin managed to save us from a rampage courtesy of the One-tails, and Tsunade is on her way as we speak.”

Sakura starts to wakefulness, falls of the bed. “Giant...frogs?” she mutters to herself.

“Yes,” Kakashi nods, “Naruto also mastered the art of summoning.”

Iruka lets his head drop into his hands, lets his fingers press against the inside corners of his eyes. “Orochimaru?” he whispers, needing to hear it again.

“Dead,” Kakashi repeats in a firm voice. He scoots the chair closer.

“I’m—” Sakura stands, looks blearily at both of them, “I’m gonna go check on Naruto.” She stumbles out of the room, a hand on the wall as a sort of guide.

They watch her go with concern. “Tsunade—to help Lee?” Iruka finally asks, forcing his brain to process all that Kakashi had said.

“Yes,” Kakashi turns his attention back to the other man. “And _apparently_ Hiruzen is considering asking her to be the next Hokage. It’s all very hush-hush, at this point, though.”

Iruka considers that. He’s never met Tsunade, so he can’t rightly judge if she’d be a good Hokage. “The...One-tails?” he hesitantly asks.

Kakashi sighs, though it is good-natured, “You probably know more than everyone that Naruto has the annoying habit of making friends with everyone. Even people who want to kill him.”

“ _Especially_ people who want to kill him,” Iruka mutters, going silent as Kakashi nods sympathetically and continues.

“The jinchuuriki—the son of the Kazekage, I think—I don’t really know the details yet, but he and Naruto really managed to bond even after punching each other out,” the other man sighs, tips his head to the side, “Naruto got pretty, er, roughed up, but he’s going to be all right.”

“Sasuke?” Iruka asks.

“I’m pretty sure he hasn’t left Naruto’s side since they came to the hospital,” Kakashi smiles slightly at that. “He got knocked out, but he was fine.”

Iruka sighs, relieved. He didn’t expect most of them to make it, and he definitely didn’t expect them to be successful in killing Orochimaru.

“Where’s Anko?” he finally remembers to ask. The last thing he remembers her doing is dispatching an Oto nin before he was faced with Orochimaru head on.

“Err,” Kakashi scratches his head, looks slightly distressed, “With Ibiki? Last time I saw her was yesterday, and she was kicking Orochimaru to make sure he was dead.”

Iruka can only stare, perplexed.

Kakashi shrugs, “The Hokage wasn’t stopping her.”

Silence returns, comfortable, and Iruka mulls over the recent events until the door opens again, and Sakura peeks in. “Iruka-sensei, Akane-san said she would be down here soon. She has to make sure Gai-sensei isn’t still crying all over Lee and Neji,” she says, slipping into the room and resuming her position at the end of his bed. “You’ll probably be able to leave; they only brought you here because of chakra exhaustion and your levels are already back to normal.”

Akane comes into the room right after Sakura finishes speaking, clipboard in hand and dark bags under her eyes. She affirms the girl’s assessment and signs Iruka out. Kakashi seems ridiculously pleased with the progress that his student has seen.

They leave, once Iruka is wearing his clothes again, and go to visit Naruto near the front of the building.

Sasuke is sitting in the only chair next to the blond’s bed, looking like he wants to kill something. Naruto is babbling to Jiraiya, who is _so_ not paying the boy any attention. Naruto breaks off his talking when Iruka and the other two enter the room, launches himself out of the bed with the signature screech of, “Iru-tou-san!”

“Hey!” Sakura, blessed, blessed Sakura steps forward and puts Naruto into a headlock, drags him back to the bed, “You haven’t been discharged, yet, so get some rest! You’re still injured!”

He whines about that, and that break in conversation allows Jiraiya to clap Iruka and Kakashi on the shoulders and take off as fast as he can away from the hospital.

Kakashi goes to Sasuke, asks if he wants to go back to the Wakahisa compound to at least clean up, but the boy gets a pinched, stubborn look on his face.

“I’ll stay here until you come back,” Sakura raises a hand as she volunteers. “It will give me peace of mind, anyway, that the idiot won’t be able to escape.”

Sasuke reluctantly nods, and immediately departs out of the window. Kakashi and Iruka look at each other, shrug, and depart with synchronized waves to both Sakura and Naruto, who wave in reply.

The house is closed up and musty from having the amado closed and left closed for the past day. It’s early enough in the morning that it is still a little cold, but it’s nice enough that Iruka goes around and opens all of the storm shutters, happy to be home and to be safe, at least for a little while.

Tsunade arrives without much fanfare a week after Orochimaru’s failed destruction of Konoha. Most people don’t realize she is back in the city, so busy as they are rebuilding the wall and houses that were destroyed. The medic nin at the hospital, at least, are overjoyed for her to be there (as is Gai) because of the sheer load of difficult surgeries they are facing. Her first is Lee, Iruka hears from Sakura when he is stopping by the hospital one day to bring her lunch.

Sakura has dived right in to help at the hospital after Akane heard of her rudimentary skills. Iruka is glad for that, at least, because Sasuke and Naruto, who came home after only a couple days in the hospital, are doing nothing but loaf. Hiruzen is still planning on appointing several genin as chuunin, but his appointments are delayed by the flurry of activity setting Konoha to rights.

Iruka just has to worry about the Academy, which thankfully was not destroyed. Ebisu was badly injured while assisting the fight against the snakes that destroyed the outer wall, and Suzume has to take over teaching for one of the other kunoichi who was likewise injured.

So they have to plan and execute classes for two extra classes than their own, which mostly ends with early release for the kids. The Hokage was adamant about getting the Academy back to full running capacity after the destruction, as a way to free up parents and laborers from having to watch their children.

Iruka sees Kakashi and Anko, but never for very long. They all have jobs they need to do. But it still is weird, following the weeks where Kakashi was basically everywhere Iruka was.

Two weeks after the crush, when Konoha is mostly rebuilt and the problems with the Land of Wind are beginning to be dealt with, Iruka comes home late, with groceries, to find Kakashi passed out in the garden with the dog sleeping on top of him and the kids gone with a note that they are at the Inuzuka compound.

Iruka leaves the jounin to sleep, spends a short time putting away the food and making dinner. Eggplant miso, enough for the two of them plus leftovers, rice, and pickles. He shakes the dog’s bowl and drops an extra piece of meat in it. That inspires the shiba to come bouncing in, which wakes Kakashi.

He slowly makes it into the room where the chabudai is, looking marginally better than Iruka imagines he looked before the nap. Iruka motions to the waiting zabuton and place setting, and has a temporary crisis when Kakashi pauses to look— _really_ look—at him. But he sits down, and they eat.

Cleaning up is a shared effort, and the entire affair makes Iruka consider when Kakashi essentially became a part of the Wakahisa household. He ignores the twisting flip-flops his stomach sends itself into, and makes them tea to drink on the engawa where they can see the fireflies in the forest.

(and he also completely ignores how romantic it is but how normal it seems for both of them. The small voice in his head that sounds like Anko cackles non-stop)

He doesn’t even realize that Kakashi has tugged down his mask until the dog comes out of the house and settles between them. It’s—it’s cool, it’s no big deal, Kakashi is just _really hot_. Kakashi seems to pick up on his conflicting feelings, because he gestures to his face, says, “I can—”

“It’s fine,” Iruka says, waving a hand, but it’s _not_ fine, goddamn it, and he’s pretty sure he needs to get that off of his chest. “Fuckin’—just,” he pauses, continues, “Kakashi, you’re _really_ hot and for the longest time I’ve been wondering why you’ve just been hanging around because Anko says you _like_ me and I don’t know if I can believe anything that woman says, plus you’re, like,” he makes a vague gesture at the other man, “you’re _Hatake Kakashi_ and other tha—”

“Hey,” Kakashi interrupts, looking amused but concerned. “If it’s any consolation, _you’re_ pretty hot, too.” He drinks some tea, continues nonchalantly, “Which I guess is part of the reason why I’ve stuck around, other than the fact that I’m sort of in love with you.”

The silence. The silence is _so goddamned silent_ that Iruka can hear the creaking of the pipes inside the bath house/shed. All the way across the courtyard.

“What.”

Iruka stands, wobbles over to the rain barrel, and sticks his head in. When he basically word-barfed his feelings to Kakashi, he didn’t know what to expect, but he definitely did not expect a similar return of his feelings.

Once his head is thoroughly doused and he is proven to have been awake for that entire ordeal, he turns back to find Kakashi only a few paces behind him, looking more concerned than he previously did. “Sorry,” he says, trying to piece together words that will be coherent, “I was checking to make sure I didn’t dream and or hallucinate that.”

Kakashi laughs, and it is one of the best things that Iruka has seen. Then he sobers up, asks, “May I take you to dinner tomorrow?”

“Sure?” Iruka replies, still feeling like he should be pinching himself because of the surrealness of the entire evening.

“Seven, then, I’ll swing by. Thank you for dinner,” Kakashi dips his head, squeezes one of Iruka’s hands that he wasn’t aware the other man was holding, and flashes away.

Anko finds him laying in the middle of the tatami that cover the main room’s floor, staring at the shiba unblinking. She says hello, wanders into the kitchen to get food, and comes back out fifteen minutes later with reheated food to find him still laying on the floor, staring at the dog.

“Are you...okay?” she asks, prodding him in the shoulder with a toe.

He turns his head to her, eyes still glazed. “I have a date.”

Without care for her food or her person, Anko drops into a seated position, prods Iruka with one of her chopsticks, “‘ruka, ‘ruka holy shit tell me everything, was it Kakashi?”

Iruka’s face flames red—he can’t see it, but he sure as hell can feel it. “Yes,” he says.

Anko rolls on top of him, sighs happily, “I’m so happy for you.”

He merely grunts in reply, unable to form a coherent sentence.

“This means, though, that we need to lay down some ground rules,” Anko continues, still rolling and still trying to eat. “First, no sex in my room. Second, no sex when the kids are home. Third—”

“God’s above, Anko,” Iruka wheezes, pushing himself up so that she rolls onto the floor and spills miso on herself, “this isn’t you and Ibiki we’re talking about, he just asked me on a date _tonight_ and I don’t put out on the first date and also _I am terrified_.”

She blinks. Blinks again. “Iruka, you’re a great catch. Why would he not want to have sex with you at some point, if not the first date? Do I have to remind you that even _Yasu_ was aware of your overwhelming sex appeal and Yasu was not interested in sex with anyone, ever?”

He groans, rolls himself into a ball next to the dog. She doesn’t leave him alone, though, but lays her head against his back, and keeps prodding in that overly happy tone of hers, “It’s not like you never had a rivalry with me for him, anyway, so we should both be happy that I have found Ibiki and you have found Kakashi.”

“Ankoooo,” he groans, “What if he doesn’t like me?”

“Wakahisa Iruka!” she suddenly stands over him, points dripping chopsticks directly at his face so the miso ends up on his chin, “Stop underselling yourself! He already basically lives here most of the time because you have a habit for picking up strays that is worse than Naruto’s! He _knows_ you already! If he didn’t like you, he wouldn’t have asked you out!”

And that is when they learn in the worst way that the kids heard that statement. Not just Naruto and Sakura and Sasuke, no, but most of the genin who have taken to coming over in the evenings because there is minimal supervision at the Wakahisa household.

“Date?” Sakura demands, falling into the room when Ino pushes her despite Kiba holding them both around the waist. “What?”

“Noooo,” Iruka moans quietly, curling in on himself again. He blocks out the cacophony of noise that follows, and waits until the teens are outside of the house before uncurling. Anko is sitting, like a civilized person, at the chabudai, finishing her miso.

“They’re going down to the river,” she says when she sees his eyes again, sounding as shamed as Anko can, which is not very much. “Sorry about that.”

“You are,” Iruka grasps for an appropriate word, “the worst.”

“It’s true, though,” Anko says, putting down her bowl and looking at him with concern, “don’t undersell yourself. I don’t think Hatake Kakashi ever does anything without first thinking it through completely.”

(somewhere, on the other side of the village, Kakashi is suddenly set upon by a flurry of sneezes, and gets a feeling somebody is talking about him)

“I know,” he sighs, scooting to the table and resting his head on it. “It’s just—so much has happened recently, and nothing really feels real.”

Anko pats his head, “If you continue feeling like that, tell me, and I’ll ask Tsunade-sama if you might have injured your brain.”

In reality, dinner is just dinner and Iruka has a good time. They go to the barbecue place (where thankfully Asuma and his team are not) and Iruka returns home feeling fuzzy and good. Returns home just in time to see of Ino and Sakura, who are holding hands and dressed up and say in sync, “date night with Kiba” before striding off into the village. Naruto and Sasuke are inside, Naruto blearily reciting hand signs to himself, Sasuke’s head pillowed on the other boy’s stomach as he reads a cookbook.

Life, though temporarily completely gone bananas, settles down a little after that. Hiruzen appoints Shikamaru (to no one’s surprise) and Sakura (to everyone’s surprise) as chuunin, and they are the only two of the year.

And after a while it becomes difficult to imagine life without the never-ending flow of people in his house. Kiba and Ino begin spending more time over, locked in a strange three-way relationship with Sakura that seems to work really well for them. He has the misfortune of finding out about Naruto and Sasuke by literally walking in on one of their make-out sessions.

But life goes on. They are all a little more on edge, a little more aware of the catastrophes that could befall the village and their family at any instant.

Which is why it is no surprise when Sasuke’s brother reappears as a member of Akatsuki, bent on kidnapping Naruto. Kakashi and a couple other jounin are there to stop it, but it leaves Kakashi in a hospital bed for a substantial amount of time. Jiraiya is the one who comes up with the idea of Naruto coming with him, travelling and training. If not for how hurt and desperate Sasuke  looks when that becomes a viable option, Iruka would agree. The Sannin finally agrees to take both boys, on the condition that any make-out sessions occur far enough away from him that he can’t hear them. Tsunade roars with laughter at that, and once the boys have left the village she takes Sakura under her wing, recognizing the the girl’s growing medical prowess.

This leaves Anko and Iruka with more free time than they know what to do with. But it leaves Kakashi with even more. With the shortage of uninjured nin during the long stretch of time after Orochimaru’s defeat, he is sent on back-to-back missions. So after their first dinner-date, it is a month or more before they do more than wave goodbye to each other.

The house is so empty without the boys. Sakura is overjoyed to be learning from the best medical nin in all of the hidden villages, but she misses the boys who started as her classmates and became her brothers. They receive unmarked letters from a frog summon every week, on the week, and that same summon takes letters back for Naruto and Sasuke and Jiraiya. But letters are not the same as talking and seeing and holding and the absence of their boys makes the whole house lonely.

Jiraiya did not say how long they would be gone, but Iruka feels that it will be a long time. Sakura trains and trains and when the next chuunin exams come, less than a year later through a combined feat of cooperation of the Land of Wind and the Land of Fire, she goes with Ino and Choji and the rest of their year mates, and watches her friends become chuunin as well.

Iruka goes on a lot of dates with Kakashi, and as Anko predicted they do have sex. Lots of sex. Particularly when no one is in the house.

After prancing around the topic for a week or so, Sakura finally sits down with Iruka and asks him if Ino and Kiba can join the Wakahisa clan. Kiba is the second child, so unless his sister dies he will never head the Inuzuka clan, and Ino’s parents have already accepted that Ino-Shika-Cho will continue even if their children do not live as they do. Iruka sighs, a long-suffering sigh, and pulls out the paperwork that he’s had preemptively filled out for months.

The family that had just started as him and Anko has grown and grown, and within a week after Ino and Kiba move in he takes some house-building books out from the library and considers their options.

Kakashi finds him with the books, concerned, kisses his hands and asks if he’s going to burn the house down. Iruka doesn’t realize he’s crying until Kakashi’s hands wipe his face and he is pulled into the other man’s chest. In the months that have slipped into years that have gone since Naruto and Sasuke left, he has told himself that this is good for all of them, that one day any one of them may be gone, but it has just caused all the hurt to build up in his chest until it could no longer contain itself.

Gai seems to catch wind of the building plans, and soon most of the village hears about the restoration and expansion of the Wakahisa clan. Iruka finds himself stopped often on the street and given gifts of all sorts. It still weirds him out that he is the head of a clan, a relatively _important_ clan, at that, though he has been for years.

Before they break any ground, he returns to the secret basement that still houses the clan scrolls, brings them up and finally gives himself time to pour over them. They have techniques, history, and even family trees contained in them, and Iruka fills Sakura’s emptied shelves with them.

A sprawling secondary house goes up inside the woods, traditionally styled but with all modern amenities. It has a full library (which he is secretly the biggest fan of) and enough room for their family to grow and continue growing. Soon enough Sakura and Kiba and Ino are living there, and Anko officially asks Ibiki to marry her.

The thought of Anko getting married, even as she is preparing to, is still one that hurts Iruka’s brain. “Anko” and “commitment” are two words that rarely, if ever go together. He actually has a mini meltdown following her telling him, because he just got the secondary house built, and if he has to build another one—

But Anko sweetly reminds him that she’s his sister, so she gets to stay in the main house.

They send the frog back to Jiraiya the week of Anko’s engagement with the proposed date, but never really receive a confirmation that they will be able to come. It is a risk, Iruka knows, but Anko is like an aunt if not a mother to both of the boys. Surprisingly, Anko doesn’t force him into any planning, but gets Shizune to help her. Despite having only been in Konoha for only a short time, Tsunade’s assistant almost immediately hit it off with Anko. According to her, they bonded over poisons.

Neither Ibiki nor Anko have much family—Ibiki has a brother, but that is it other than Anko’s adopted family. So the ceremony is really small, and over quite quickly. The reception, on the other hand—

Iruka is wearing his nicest kimono and refusing to do anything. Kakashi is also wearing his nicest kimono, and Iruka has to keep reminding himself that to jump the other man in public, particularly at Anko’s wedding reception, would be indecent. Not that Anko would mind, in the least. There is a lot of alcohol, a lot of food, and the courtyard of the compound is full of their friends. Iruka feels...pretty goddamn content.

When they hear Sakura shrieking, it sends off alarms in both of their heads, but then Iruka gets a flash of bright orange and he has to grab on to Kakashi so he won’t fall over. Sasuke and Naruto are both hugging Sakura, and Iruka cannot believe how tall they have grown, how much older they look despite having only been gone for a couple years.

Naruto looks over the crowd, and when he notices Iruka and Kakashi his face lights up, and he pushes through the people who let him pass easily, yells, “Iru-tou-san!”

Iruka hugs his sons, thanks whatever gods there are that they are back. Naruto’s hair is cropped short (later Iruka will learn that it accidentally caught on fire when they were running away from some missing nin in Kirigakure) but Sasuke’s is long, pulled back out of his face. They are tanned and happy, holding onto him like leeches with twin grins stretched across their faces.

Anko starts crying embarrassingly when the boys find her, hugs them both and then forces each of them to dance with her.

After the wedding and the reception (which, all told, takes around a day and a half), Iruka finally has some time to relax. Naruto and Sasuke both passed out and are still asleep late the morning after, so Iruka figures he might as well let them sleep.

Sakura and Ino are in the kitchen, Ino attempting to make food and Sakura half-sleeping at the island. Jiraiya, who had disappeared the night before, is sitting and scribbling in the next room without any teenage boys to distract him. Iruka leaves him be, sits beside Sakura and blearily watches Ino start rice and broth in two separate pans, humming quietly to herself. Slowly Kakashi comes down from the room that he and Iruka have taken to sharing, the room full of pictures, and Kiba after him. The three teenagers gladly gave up their place in the secondary house so Ibiki and Anko could have relative peace (and so they wouldn’t have to hear the riotous wedding sex), so the main Wakahisa house is very full.

Once the noise in the kitchen—which spills into the main room where they eat—reaches more than a dull roar, Jiraiya departs with the pinched look of a hangover about him and Naruto and Sasuke stumble out of their shared room.

They all make it through breakfast without falling asleep, though Kakashi tries, and spend the rest of the day in peace. Naruto and Sasuke share their adventures. Now that they are back home safe they can tell.

They spent a lot of time along the coast. Iruka suspects that that is because more people wear bathing suits along the coast, but they also spent some time in the Land of Earth. What surprises Iruka the most is the hand-bound book that Sasuke bashfully shows them, full of recipes that he collected whenever they stayed in a country long enough to eat food.

They have more scars and stories than can be explained in one day, but Iruka is fine with that. Jiraiya had told him the day before that they were back for good because he had found out more about Akatsuki while travelling, and judged that it would be appropriate for them to return to Konoha.

Iruka is really fucking thankful. It had been a long time they had been gone.

Though, really, now that they’re back Iruka doesn’t know what to do with them. Both of them are basically A-rank nin, though not even chuunin, so technically they could petition for a field promotion. But that would still take weeks for the paperwork, and they can’t go on any missions except with Kakashi—after all, he still is their sensei.

A week after the boys are back, a week after the wedding, disaster arrives via a bird from Sunagakure. Naruto feels a sort of kinship, a relation, to Gaara who is now the Kazekage, so his kidnapping hits the blond the hardest. The four of them leave, a team once again, and Iruka is stuck teaching, once again. Alone as he can be with only Anko there. Konohamaru’s class is close to graduating, which is a relief, but they still remain a handful and thoroughly tire Iruka out at the best of times. At the worst of times—well, Iruka has never failed any of his students before the genin test but some of them _might_ this year and the prospect of that happening is one of the most terrifying things Iruka has ever faced.

Hiruzen, who has slowly been transferring his duties over to a surprisingly willing Tsunade, is more than willing to advise him and call in the children’s parents to talk with them. The old man seems to understand how frazzled Iruka is with most of his family out of the village. He is especially willing because one of the students who might fail is his own grandson.

When they arrive back in Konoha, a week and a half later with Gai and his team, Iruka feels the crackling of Kakashi’s chakra all the way from his classroom, where he’s grading papers. He finishes the papers, files them, and gathers his things. Kakashi’s chakra, now tangibly surrounded by Sakura and Naruto and Sasuke’s, is hovering in the hospital. Iruka pauses outside the front of the school, flickers to his house, drops his things off on the clean chabudai, waits for a few moments outside the house.

The four chakra signatures flicker as a group and the first thing Kakashi does is wrap his arms around Iruka. Sakura pantomimes barfing, slowly drags herself into the main house, squeezes Iruka’s outstretched hand as she walks by.

“The Kazekage is alright,” Kakashi quietly says, rubbing his nose against Iruka’s neck.

“I’m not sure alright is the right word,” Sasuke mutters, grabbing Naruto’s hand as they follow Sakura inside.

Iruka looks at Kakashi, raises an eyebrow.

“It’s—” he grimaces, tugs his mask down to press a kiss to Iruka’s nose, “it’s complicated.”

He manages to get the whole story after dinner that night, when they are all sitting in the garden eating popsicles that Anko brought home with her. How Gaara was kidnapped, the One-Tails extracted from his body. How Sasori and Deidara were defeated. And how they found Gaara’s lifeless body and Chiyo gave up her own life for her Kazekage.

The thankfulness that Iruka feels for his kids being safe intensifies, but there is a seed of worry there, worry that Akatsuki will somehow get Naruto, that Sasuke will have to face his brother when that happens.

Anko leaves to find Ibiki, who is still at work, and drag him out for a late dinner. Ino and Kiba arrive from, Iruka assumes, training, wrap their arms around Sakura and carry her to the other house. And after a few minutes of near silence, Sasuke and Naruto wander off to bed, leaving Iruka and Kakashi alone in the garden.

“Are you worried?” Iruka finally asks, tipping his head back on Kakashi’s lap so he can look the other man in the eye.

Kakashi sighs, looks up at the fireflies flitting above the tops of the trees in the woods. “Always,” he says. And he pauses, looks back down at Iruka, says quieter, “They’ll be fine. We have to believe that.”

“I know,” Iruka says, reaches up and tugs the other man down to kiss him. “I know.”


End file.
